


The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades

by Mad_Max



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Boss/Employee Relationship, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Abuse, Class Differences, Complicated Relationships, Disney World & Disneyland, Established Relationship, Florida AU, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, Office Sex, Open Relationships, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Relationships will be added
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:53:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 40,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26364475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: They should never have been living in the motel full-time. There was a plan. Ma has always had a plan. God had come to her, told her to sell the Manhattan land and cash in. Move to Florida, where they had good tax, low tax. Lot of Christians in Florida. Lot of land, build a church. It should never have gone differently.The AU where Credence is a character performer in Disney World. (please note tag changes)
Relationships: Credence Barebone/Original Percival Graves, Credence Barebone/Original Percival Graves/Theseus Scamander, Original Percival Graves/Theseus Scamander
Comments: 31
Kudos: 23





	1. Sullen boy on the alien planet of the Sunshine State.

**Author's Note:**

> This one takes place in 2009. Credence is 24.
> 
> Credit to a friend for the chapter title.

The red sedan in front of them breaks unexpectedly at a green light. Two little flash-flashes at the break tap. Ma’s fist tenses as he looks, white knuckles on the wheel, hazards flashing. Clenches her jaw as she jerks the car into the middle lane. Because it’s still dark, Credence tells himself, she’ll get over it by the time she pulls back into the motel parking lot, once he is at work.

Hoping this is true, he uncurls the fist in his lap, presses his fingertips into the cheap polyester suit covering his thigh, itching. He crosses his thumb over his palm and presses down there too. Ma hits the blinker off with the side of her index finger as they slide back into the left lane, her anger and white noise, like the buzz of the radio left on at low volume and caught between stations. 

Because it’s still dark, he tells himself, the school bus will trundle up the strip to take Modesty away for an entire day, and Ma will go off to oversee the cinderblock pile that is slowly building itself into their swampland church down past the Walmart where they bought paper plates for the room on the first day. He will be home again before dark. He watches Ma’s eyes scale his face in the rearview mirror, squinting, making him small.

Everything in his life relies on the position of the sun. The sun still below the horizon. The hot air balloons carting rich tourists across their new gold portion of the sky each morning, Modesty’s hands tensed small and pale over the railing, eyes glowing in the half-dark and cast upward, to watch. And 

She is the only one who is allowed watching, standing on the balcony, staring into the dimness of the parking lot a sullen smudge in school uniform khakis, waving sullenly at the neighbours. The red sedan is back on their periphery, pressing up on Credence’s door. He glances at Ma, her hands on the wheel. Pushing sixty in a forty-five zone.

“There are two dollars in the glove compartment,” she says when she notices his looking. He watches her eyes watch his in the rearview mirror as she guns it under the overpass without stopping for the toll. She says, “You’ll need it for your lunch.”

Because it’s still dark outside, Chastity will be in the bathtub enjoying the time free from either Ma or Credence, a chance to loiter somewhere cool and alone apart from Modesty on the balcony overlooking the cracked tarmac of the parking lot and the scruffy grass leading off toward the highway. The hot air balloons and waving tourists, the square crater of chlorine with the spidery chairs tossed around it that everyone have collectively conspired to pretend is a pool.

He knows that Modesty wants to go in the pool and has secret plans to do it when they’re all asleep. No amount of warning from Credence could ever deter her, she has the foolish confidence of the favourite child, a talisman he has never worn himself. He watches Ma’s eyes follow the arch of his head bowing, his hands fumbling for the glove compartment. Knocks the lid with his knuckle, apotropaic. He finds two bills tucked into a pamphlet for AAA and folds them neatly into his pocket.

“You’ll have to start taking sandwiches,” she announces later over the metronomic click of the indicator signal as they hit their exit. “You cannot expect to be given money every day for something that you could make yourself, Credence. That is not how you were raised.”

He’s thirty minutes too early to check in at the entertainment desk just over that side of the entrance of the tunnel, or to swipe his card in the little machine on the wall where a line has already formed, and he is too early to justify the wait. The benches at the back are already occupied by sleepers, probably the dawn spare shift crew folded over their black sacks, sweatshirt hoods pulled over their faces. Credence doesn't envy them. He trails his fingers over the cement wall on the way down to costuming.

There’s no one else in there yet but Babs with the fried blond hair who’s worked the register going on fifteen years, according to herself, her name tag proudly decked out in Jiminy Cricket pins, dragging the striped fabric of her blouse pocket clean away. A light is about to go over her register, flickers dimly butter yellow. He gives her a small wave as he fingers through the racks, Modesty on the balcony, the same sullenness they all seem to have that stands out now in the glaring Florida sun more than it ever did in New York, but she beams back at him like he’s brought the daylight inside with himself.

“You got Crystal Palace again, sweetheart?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good for you,” she says, “gitcha some free breakfast.”

She loves that he calls her ‘ma’am’, makes her kindly to him. Good manners boy, she called him on the first day, eyes flickering over the name tag now in his pocket. Is that your real name tag, darling? Yes ma’am. That your real name, really? Really, ma’am, it really is. _Cree_ _-_ _dence_ _Bare_ _-_ _bone_ , pronouncing each syllable like it was something special, a secret smile ever since for him, for good manners boy, sweetheart honey-darling. She gives him a little nudge on his wrist as she slides a grey t-shirt and faded black shorts over the counter and into his canvas sack without scanning their barcodes. A wink through heavy eye makeup.

“You always look so hot in that suit, hon.”

“There’s Gatorade in the breakroom,” Credence promises her. He doesn’t know why he wants her not to worry. He likes her worry. He shoulders the costume sack as she shakes her head at him, wincing as the bulky character head hits the back of his knee.

“You just be careful out in that heat,” she says, tilts her head. “I don’t wanna see you coming out of here on a stretcher one of these days. Gets so hot out there. You’ll make yourself sick.”

Credence changes in the bathroom once he’s left her with another sullen little wave and a promise to drink lots of fluids and snag himself a Mickey Mouse shaped waffle from the bin they’ll bring into the breakroom backstage at the restaurant, once he gets there. He hesitates over the basics she'd given him. He’s never worn shorts before, not even as a little boy. He only does now because Ma will never see him, and it’s hot and there is some relief in feeling the cool tunnel air over the rubbery white skin of his legs even if they do look like two hairy chalk sticks stretching out from underneath him.

At the entertainment desk, he gives his name and cast member number and the set location and shows his ID. They give him a warm-up time starting in fifteen minutes. He sits off to the side against the costume bag, watching the last warm-up wind down until his turn.

He anticipates the pause before his name at roll call, already nodding.Yes, there are really people walking the Earth with names like Credence Barebone. Present. He ducks his head after, flushing against the heavy of many eyes on the back of his neck, and hurries to get himself an exercise mat and an elastic band from beside the wall. 

His spindly body is stronger than it was two months ago. He makes it through fifteen minutes of light jogging and wrist and ankle stretches without losing his breath. He's grown used to the physical weight of movement in a costume made of plastic fur on his shifts, steady meals of backstage-bin restaurant food and Gatorade and plastic-wrapped dollar muffins from the cast cafeteria, carrying the sack back and forth, jogging the tunnels to make it to the remote corners of Frontierland and Tomorrowland on time before someone marks him late and throws points against his record.

The instructor guiding them all through hamstring stretches is one that Credence knows from the first week. They had shared a cigarette out on the benches beside the bus stop, and he had laughed when Credence admitted that he didn't know what a glute was or how to stretch one. His body follows along with the warm-up routine by habit. Stretching his core, his arms. He holds himself stiffly against the thumbs up this earns him, the little jolt of recognition from a stranger who has seen that he is _trying_ _._

Once he’s finally on his way down the right side of the tunnel after warming up, the sack of costume bits and grey-and-black t-shirt and sweatpants basics cutting into his shoulder, he lets himself wonder if Percival will call him into the office today. It’s been a week.

He glances up at the epoxy-brown trash chutes in the tunnel ceiling, as though they might tell him the time of day in answer to this question. Everything in his life depends on the exact position of the sun in the sky. The trash chutes overhead: groaning, chipping paint. Still early, but daylight somewhere. Modesty in school, Chastity in the swamp with Ma and the cinderblocks and the construction crew who hate all of them, but Ma foremost, because the church will really only ever be hers.

If Percival does not ask to see him - for a word, in private - it’s probably safe to assume that their thing is over.

He could get over the disappointment, Credence thinks as he shuffles down the tube of a long corridor. He might lose his bid spot, but he would live. His lungs would still function in this dystopia, pump oxygen through his blood, the whole sweaty mess of him, frantic body-mashing over the desk, hiding the burn on his chin from Percival’s unshaven chin and cheek with cheap foundation that doesn’t quite match his waxen shade of pale. It might be a bit sad. He thinks that he likes Percival, likes kissing him over his desk, even enjoys the terror-thrill of sponging the evidence of their fucking from the collar of his grey, company-issued basics t-shirts before returning them to be washed. Yes, it will be a bit sad if it ends, but he thinks that he could recover. He’s recovered from so much more than that in his life already.

Around him, the tunnel is beginning to fill with morning activity. One of the cartoon chipmunks and a princess he doesn’t recognise pass by, the chipmunk wearing its cartoon head under its arm, the girl inside chattering into a cellphone against her cheek, unwrapping cigarettes from a carton with her free hand. Her eyes scan him as they cross paths, wide and brown beneath a mass of hair piled onto her head, frowning. He reshoulders the costume bag, which had begun to trail on the floor.

At some point, the trash chutes wind down the ceiling to the left side of the wall beside a parked golf cart, give way to pipes of Lord-knows-what. Epoxy-purple. Credence eyes them with reluctance as he passes. Close enough now that he will know soon, for better or for worse.

*

The flight down from New York had been all of their first, even Ma’s. Some rattlebox, discount affair booked online from a public library computer. Narrow seats and stale air. _Frontier_ _Airlines_ in yellow plastic on the marquee.

Apart from Ma, they had no luggage. That cost extra. Just a backpack each with spare clothes, their Bibles, whatever relics could be dug up from their bedrooms in the old creaking church on Pike Street, soon-to-be-demolished.

Still, those early hours of the journey felt as close to exciting as anything ever had to Credence. He wasn’t utterly ignorant of the world. Even he knew about beaches and Disney World and orange juice and heat. He looked forward to an entire twelve months without need of a coat, without shivering himself to sleep in his bed December through March. He knew that he could forget about the beaches and the theme parks, they would never open to him, she would never let them. But she could not alter the weather. The Sunshine State. He thought to himself as he packed that he would relish December in shirt-sleeves.

They hit heavy turbulence flying over Georgia. Ma had them link hands and pray for safe landings. She told Credence to go into the washroom and wash his face when he had set his stinging hand back into his lap. She could not bear to look at him when she was in a bad mood. That would not change in Florida any more than it had at home.

It was a short flight, two and a half hours, two trips to Brooklyn on a city bus. They had to go straight to the bank when they landed, check on the status of their loan, Ma said. They had to be ready to alight quickly, not to be lost in the chaotic airport rush, ushered into a waiting cab.

On the flight, crunched into the cheapest row at the back of the plane, she wouldn’t let them open the windows to look outside. But the woman next to Chastity kept hers up, blinding sunlight. Once his eyes adjusted, Credence could see over her shoulder that it was just rolling sky beyond, thinking to himself unkindly over the sting in his palm that she was afraid they would look and see and realise there was no God. 

*

The summons comes halfway into Credence’s shift, as he’s toeing off the legs of his striped tiger costume, panting into the hard plastic neck of a bottle of lemon Gatorade, fresh in off the restaurant floor.

He gives himself five minutes, ostensibly to wipe the sweat off the back of his neck. He needs to think. His heart is still racing from the musical send-off, all that napkin waving and bounding over the carpet in heavy fur shoes, trying not to squeeze the life out of little hands, drag little bodies through the obstacle course of chairs not properly tucked under tables, return little bodies to the bigger bodies they belong to.

Sometimes he thinks about Modesty eating in her school cafeteria while he is here. The handful of times he’s caught her in the stairwell at the motel staring into the unsympathetic glass face of the vending machine, rubbing her pointer finger against the pad of her thumb at her side absently in the sign for money, which none of them has. And then he does not think about that.

He tells himself to put on fresh basics for Percival. He does this. He blows another three or so minutes picking over leftovers in the food bin, stuffing fried potato chunks into the plastic bag in his pocket, pretending to eat, stuffing the last of the bacon into the bag, a lopped-off Mickey Mouse waffle ear, a cube of some unidentified fruit.

Listening through one ear to the latest interpersonnel drama from the permanent bid Pooh and her short friend who plays the little pig, he thinks about the highway cows dotting the fields around the Gaylord Palms, behind the big grocery store called Publix at the end of the strip, where they walk to sometimes on pamphleteering days, him and Modesty. Where they sometimes get a dollar from shoppers with rental plates, share a freezer-burned ice cream sandwich or a can of soda over the hot tar. Watch the cows graze.

Then he drinks another half a bottle of Gatorade, because he’d promised Babs. He straightens all of his things in his sack in the corner and makes sure that his costume head is properly stored on the wire rack. As he’s fixing his hair in the little mirror nailed to the wall beside the door, he wonders if those cows ever get milked, or are raised for beef, or exist just to decorate the highway.

At last, he makes his way back out into the narrow hallway by the kitchen and climbs the stairs. He follows Percival’s order to close the door and lock it. His heart skitters across his chest, cartoon-style, a furry tiger with a coiled-spring tail. He takes his seat.

“Hot in there today,” says Percival, grinning him up and down from behind the massive screen of his computer. “You look sweaty,” he remarks to Credence’s sigh of acknowledgment.

“I changed.”

“I like you sweaty,” Percival winks. He taps something into his computer, pausing, glancing Credence over again from his sweat-damp head to his clean black sweatpants with the iron-on barcode pasted onto the fabric over his lap. “Did they send in lunch already?”

“No.”

A week ago, Credence cannot help but think, bent over the desk almost in half, Percival’s hand rough, warm over the back of him, laid over his skin like it belonged there. Percival occupies every space with the whole of himself, expanding like gas, like he owns the place.

It was too easy to be so consumed by Percival’s confidence that it washed out the stain of his own guilt. Now he wishes he had somewhere to retreat to, someplace unpermeated by the awkwardness of their unbroken staring across the wooden desk.

“I was thinking,” Percival says, looking away.

He shrinks in Credence’s mind to the spot just behind his computer, which he is using as a shield to conceal half of his small mouth, his fingertips on the keyboard playing ‘see-I-am-at-work’. Cool, professional. There will be no degenerate fucking today, honeyboy. No fun for good manners. Credence drums his fingertips over the rim of the desk. He wonders if he could ever occupy a space so thoroughly, like he owned it. He decides he cannot. 

“I think we should be more practical,” says Percival briskly, “We can’t keep this up in here. We’ll both lose our jobs, and that’s not a good look for either one of us.”

On the corner of the desk is a Mickey Mouse bobblehead. Souvenir from another park, Percival had told him the first time, not meeting his eyes, gift from someone very dear to him. It’s thick, good-quality plastic, the mouse in a rainbow t-shirt with a little matching flag, probably cost a half a day of work by Credence’s standard. He flicks it with the tip of his nail. He watches its head swing back and forth.

Somewhere above him, Percival says, “I like you a lot, Credence, and I think we should have a real date, if you’d like to do that.”

Credence thinks that Percival was loved too much as a child, and it shows.

“The floor is free,” Percival jokes, “if you wanted to say something.”

If he wanted to say something, Credence would say that it is past noon, the sun at its highest point in the sky and hotter than he could have imagined when he lived off the crumbling tip of Manhattan and thought that he knew heat. His sister will leave school in an hour on the bus, which has a route devoted entirely to motels on the strip. Everyone knows when you come in by that route, exactly who you are. Modesty told him. Sometimes being the favoured child is not enough, he would say. He thinks that this was a harder lesson for him to learn than it was for Modesty. He flicks the mouse head and watches it whip around until it topples over.

At length, he shrugs.

“If you don’t want - ”

“I can’t,” he takes a sharp breath. “I’d like to. I want to, but I can’t.”

He wants to explain that he has no free time the way that other people do. Going to work is his free time, his away time. An allowance only because his income helps pay for the motel room. Ma would much rather have kept him in ignorance at home. It annoys him that they have to have this conversation at all. He'd never asked for talking. He does not think that Percival would understand.

“I know you have - issues,” Percival says, struggling around the word ‘issues’ like the unwieldily equation it is. “But, if I can help you get around them -”

“I would have to say that I worked a double,” Credence explains, more to himself, thinking out loud. “But I don’t know how I’d get around why there’s no more money for it, if I worked it. And I can’t go far away.”

“I’ll pay the difference,” says Percival instantly. “I’ll give it to you cash. We can go to the Grand Floridian. Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“Beautiful. It’s beautiful, I mean. They have a huge pool. We’ll get dinner, it’s on property, we could even take the Monorail.”

This is not going to work out, Credence thinks over Percival’s wide grin. He feels unsteady. It was better when they were just two bodies fucking, when it was just dirty, he’d take his costume back to dump in the laundry in costuming at the end of his shift and ride the bus to the parking lot and wait for Ma to drive him back before sundown. Everything in its order.

It never works out, he thinks, like Moses promising freedom and dragging the Hebrews for forty years through a desert instead. He reaches out and sets the bobblehead back on its feet, stills its head with two fingers.

“I should get back to work,” he says around the dry thickness of his tongue. Taps it gummy against the back of his front teeth.

“You look exhausted,” Percival nods, returning to his keyboard. Shifts in his chair. “Try and take a nap when you get off set next.”

“Yes, sir.”

He allows the thrill of Percival’s smirk to wash through him, his thick eyebrows raised where he’d frozen over his computer. Credence reminds himself temperance. He doesn’t like kissing unshaven skin. It doesn’t help. He adjusts his sweatpants before he stands.

“Get out of my office before we both get fired,” Percival says. “And bring your bathing suit Saturday. I don’t want to hear anything about how you’ve never owned one.”

*

They should never have been living in the motel full-time. There was a plan. Ma has always had a plan. This time should have been no different.

They were being choked out by property taxes in New York, paying for public schools they didn’t even use, for luxury housing, gentrification, fresh waves of sin. She had spent a lot of time in the library suddenly on public computers, teaching herself to use the internet. He wondered if they were being investigated again by the state, if he should talk to Modesty about what to do when a woman with a clipboard came calling.

Then Ma sat them all down around the table, as though for dinner. God had come to her, told her to sell the Manhattan land and cash in. Move to Florida, where they had good tax, low tax. Lot of Christians in Florida. Lot of land, build a church.

Foolishly, they all knew now, she had been counting on the sale of the Manhattan property going through quickly. She had promised a week before they were all installed in a house attached to the new church out in swampland. She’d been in touch with the contractors for months. She had paid them. Lined up a loan at the Suntrust Bank with a new account.

They drove to the site with their backpacks on their laps. She had let Credence sit up front, reluctantly, because his legs were too long for the back seat. Never been in a car before, at home. The novelty of rolling down the window with the button on the passenger door so that he could look out. Sticky Florida heat, all swamp grass and sitting water, mosquitos and gnats. And the property. Cinderblocks still, nothing fit for habitation, not human nor divine.

*

The week passes in: morning shift, rising before the sun, hot air balloons over the highway, home by dinner with bags of salad on the back seat. AC broken. Too hot for soup and casserole in the cramped motel kitchen. Modesty sent to bed early for watching distant theme parks fireworks on the balcony. Whipped for this, he was meant to be watching her. Wrists, at least, small mercies, because he needs hands for work. He rolls out his comforter for bed without a word. He doesn't bother to wait for dinner. 

On Friday, his day off, he walks down the strip holding Modesty’s hand in one of his, dollar store bandaids and bacitracin over the split skin, and a stack of leaflets in the other. They manage to flag down three cars. One, New Jersey plates, think they’re hitchhiking, call out something about social services and children out in the hot sun before speeding off.

Credence wishes that he had a cellphone so that he could call Percival and cancel their date. He has a sinking feeling about it. Every image of it in his mind ends in horror. Ma would have said, God came to me. God is always coming to people for useless things, things that do not matter one bit to him in his life. He wishes that he had someone to ask. He worries about what he is going to say when they're alone. 

He doesn’t tell Modesty why they have to hang out in the parking lot in front of Subway for an hour. Her bouncing at his side in the heat, patient as ever. She wants to tell him something about school that he doesn’t understand, having never been there himself, some test she passed, a certificate on its way in the mail. He listens lopsidedly through one ear, watching the entrance to the gift shop in the strip through narrowed eyes.

Across the parking lot, tourists come and go from an outlet for a sporting goods store. Sale in huge words on a banner over the glass windows; Credence is sure they would have what he needs, and that they would catch him, too. A bell tinkles down the sidewalk. The door to the gift store hangs open, gaping toothless spot in a mouth, a girl comes out with a broom and begins to sweep.

“Wait for me right here,” he says to Modesty. “When I come out, follow me. Don’t ask why.”

He doesn’t wait for her answer. His legs feel like strips of rubber beneath the suffocating weave of his suit trousers. If he’s caught - he doesn’t want to think about it. The raw skin around his wrist stings angrily, a warning. He ducks inside the shop.

“Why’d you do that, Credence,” Modesty demands after, between panted breaths in the fields back behind Publix. “Why’d you take those? Coulda got caught. You’re gonna get in trouble.”

“Don't tell Ma, and I won't.”

Credence watches the cows, running the neon orange fabric of the swimming trunks between his fingers, sat in the grass with his knees to chest. He wishes they had a dollar for a soda. Somehow it’s even hotter in the grass than it was on the pavement. Sticky heavy heat, like drowning in soft butter.

There is no point in going back to the motel to sit in the sticky hot shade of the broken AC, either. He still has to hide the thing he stole. He folds the shorts between his hands into a bundle still too large for his trouser pocket and shakes his head at his own stupidity. The bulge would give him away instantly, and then he could probably forget about Percival altogether. Doubtful they’d even find his body after, the unholy terror she’d unleash.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he says over his shoulder to Modesty, still bent double and red-faced and glaring at him with all the force of a tiny Mother. His heart beats a crooked half-beat, thuh-thut-thuh. “I won’t get in trouble,” he promises. “They don’t even know who we are. They don’t even know Ma to tell her.”

“You’ll get in trouble with God. Gonna go to Hell.”

“Look around.”

He refolds the shorts again, thinking. Might be able to get away with them on beneath his trousers. Could hide them in his laundry before bed and wear them under his suit again to work, Ma none the wiser.

“That’s not like Hell,” Modesty wrinkles her nose and shrugs, unconvinced. The grass beside him tickles as she flattens it sitting down. “They don’t have cows in Hell.”

After them, Credence thinks, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile and stood beside those on the riverbank. And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows. Then Pharaoh woke up.

“I like the cows,” Modesty says softly at his side. He wasn’t expecting her voice to interrupt him. He glances down in surprise to find that she’s copied him, sat with her knees to her chest, a reed of grass between her fingers.

“Me too.”

“They’re so big,” she gestures. He watches her hands fill the air. She gives him a look, a sly little twist up from the side of her mouth as she says, “Like the big orange. I wouldn’t tell anyone if we went there one day.”

Credence takes a moment to consider the big orange down the other end of the strip, the gift shop underneath it selling, presumably, fruit-themed merchandise. Beyond it, the wizard with his staff. The giant ice cream cone. He wonders how many times Percival drives past those. He had mentioned living close by once, when he’d read the address of the motel off Credence’s employee file. That was early days. Percival on his swivel chair with his hand on the base of Credence’s neck, between his knees. It hasn't come up since.

“Sometimes the kids from downstairs go to the big orange,” Modesty says, her voice low. He has to lean in to hear her over the roar of the highway. “They go all over. They said I could go with them, but I said my mama - ” Her fingers twisting the grass into knots, she shrugs again, like dropping a stone. “I said I’m not allowed.”

That’s probably for the best, Credence thinks. The kids from downstairs are always running around, throwing chairs into the pool. Wreaking chaos.

“Come on,” he says, brushing grass from his lap, stuffing the swim shorts into his pocket. He rises slowly to his feet, stretching the curve from his back. The sun has already crossed the invisible dividing line in the sky. On the descent, it’s no longer on his side. He feels the prickle of fear creep back over him from his neck to the base of his scalp. A horn blares from the highway. He pulls the shorts back out and stuffs them down his sock beneath his trouser leg, where they will be, hopefully, less immediately obvious. “We should walk back, before she wonders.”

“She always wonders,” Modesty says, but she stands too and takes his hand. Together, they pick their way back through the scrub to the parking lot behind the steakhouse, from there to the sidewalk, the way home.

Percival is waiting for him at the entrance to the tunnel on Saturday after his shift. Away from the backdrop of his dark office, or the dark corridors between the backstage break room and the character dining room at Crystal Palace, he looks so unlike himself that Credence almost misses him. He holds his hand out and shoots Credence a tight grin that doesn’t meet his eyes. He looks nervous. He’d already warned they couldn’t touch backstage in public, not, Credence thinks, that he would have tried to anyway.

“You ever been in the park outside of work?”

They go up the hill at a safe distance from one another. Percival is just slightly ahead, the back of his tailored button-up already damp with sweat. He removed the name tag from his lapel pocket, Credence notices as they reach the winding gate around the top which separates backstage from Toontown. Percival turns and offers him another tight grin when he catches him looking.

Inside the park, they can hold hands, Percival says. They’ll be moving in crowds. No one will pay them too much attention. He doesn’t seem to mind when Credence declines, though he tucks his hands into his pockets and is quiet all through Tomorrowland after.

“I’d ask if you wanted to go on a ride,” he says, jutting his chin in the direction of a roller coaster. A little shrug as though to assert, it’s no difference to me if you do or you don’t. He nods when Credence doesn’t. Wordless, though they match pace all the way down Main Street and exit the park through the same turnstile. It's a hot walk. Credence has to stop to catch his breath. He wants to tell Percival not to wait up for him. The sum of his parts is still in dread, shaking. 

If it’s not a mistake yet, Credence thinks, this day will become one. He doesn’t air this prediction to Percival, standing in front of him with a water bottle. Something tells him that this would be hurtful, somehow. He doesn’t know how he knows this. Maybe it’s the way that Percival will glance back every few feet as they take up the route again, as though to make sure that he’s still there. Flash him the little smile always closer to his eyes, each time. He feels thrilled and uneasy with this new knowledge. He’s never had the power to hurt anyone before. He thinks to himself that he would have preferred if it were the other way around.

At some point, taking seats on the Monorail, Percival draws in closer to him. His breath is warm on Credence’s cheek. Credence can feel Percival’s smile against his ear as he whispers, “You’re quiet today.”

“I’m always quiet.”

“You’re thinking too hard about this,” Percival says softly.

Credence thinks, you have no idea.

He relents to having his hand held when they reach their destination, the Grand Floridian pool stretching out wide and blue like a second sky at their feet, surrounded by deck chairs. He thinks that the hand in his, Percival’s hand, is almost necessity, anchoring. The hotel rises behind from the ground a great, white manor with a red shingled roof, a peaked turret like a watchtower. Filled with rooms, spilling tourists from wooden mouths, surrounded by white sand, a pond roped off to guests where the ferry boat carts parkgoers from the place where they sleep to the one ‘where dreams come true’.Percival squeezes his hand around Credence’s palm. He looks at ease. Like he was born here. 

“Come on, let’s go find a chair and get out of these clothes. I’ll buy you a drink, if you’d like one.”

They change out of their sweaty suits in the same stall in the pool bathroom, pressed up against each other, hard breath, red cheeked. Percival’s chest is smoother than Credence expected, almost hairless beneath his own. He runs his fingers over it, hesitating, before pinching the red nub of Percival’s nipple between thumb and forefinger, drawing out a hiss, of pain, arousal. He apologises in whisper. He runs his tongue along Percival’s jaw.

“You’re so - dirty - for a good Christian boy,” Percival laughs against his ear. He nips the taut skin along the bottom of Percival's chin, catches neck between his teeth warm, stops, holds his teeth there. Deep breaths.

They’re in a bathroom somewhere in Disney World, going to a pool. For the first time in his life, Credence thinks, swimming in a pool. Ma would hold him under if she caught him out here, he thinks. Baptize him straight to death. He grazes the sharp of his incisors over Percival’s thorax. Anchoring. “You’re like a feral - a something,” Percival says, cupping Credence’s jaw in his palm, squeezing as he pulls him away. When they kiss, he presses his tongue into Credence’s mouth, runs it over his teeth to the gum and pulls it back. Sucks Credence’s lip into his mouth and bites down. He laughs again. He pats his fingertips on Credence’s cheek, one, three. He snaps the waistband of the orange shorts.

“I like these.”

“I stole them,” Credence admits. He huffs a breath as Percival’s hand settles between his legs, cupping him. It pulls away. He cuts the whine from his throat and swallows it.

“Really?”

“Ran in,” he huffs, “ran out.” He feels head-rushed, drunk from the newness of it all. He wants Percival to touch him again, there, but they both step apart, their clothes balled under their arms. He presses himself back into the door to make space so that Percival can lean down and pick up a dropped sock. His heart skitters unevenly in his chest, off-kilter. He feels like he needs a long drink of water.

“Grand larceny,” Percival says, smirking up through his eyebrows. The corner of his mouth points up the way it does when he’s really amused, when he really likes Credence. The way that he does.

“I’m probably going to Hell,” Credence agrees. He watches Percival study him through the grin frozen over his thin lips. He pretends not to know what that look means.

“Let’s go in the pool,” Percival mutters. He doesn’t look upset the way he did in his office, frustrated. The pale kind of anger that sits on Credence’s neck like a coating of fine dust, itching. He tugs on the point of his chin, lips pressed together thoughtful, like he wants to say something and is holding back. He leads them both out by the hand after making sure they’re presentable. When they stop beside a pair of empty chairs to drop their things, he leans over and tucks the tag back into Credence’s suit.

They go in through the shallow end. Just assumed you can’t swim, he admits. He’s right, of course. They don’t discuss it. Credence winces as his fingers slip up over the thin, raw skin of his wrist. He doesn’t say anything. Percival lets go and does not ask.

They go in and out of the pool three times. Once because Credence has to pee. The last, they stay there until the sun begins to fall back behind the crest of the horizon over the ferry pond. Percival teaches him how to paddle so that his body doesn’t sink. He teaches him how to hold his head up so that he doesn’t drown. He presses his hand against the small of Credence’s back under the water. Whispered encouragement. Sometimes he pinches the skin there, lightly, and laughs when Credence splashes him. Sometimes he leans in for a kiss.

“I don't think I've ever been with anyone as weird as you,” he says finally into the shell of Credence's ear when the sun is fully gone and most of the families have left. He flicks his tongue over Credence's earlobe. Bites gently. He lets Credence bury his face into his shoulder and say nothing. Rock in the water. “I want to take you out,” he says. His voice is thin, soft, like it’s a secret, though he’d already said as much in his office. “If you want to go out with me. I want to take you out to dinner, buy you popcorn at the movies.” He laughs. "You make me feel absurdly romantic." 

Against his shoulder, Credence groans. He listens to the sound of himself vibrating off of Percival’s skin. His eyes are stinging, but he tells himself that it's the chlorine. He wipes at them ruefully. Percival doesn’t press for an answer. Maybe he isn’t waiting for one anymore. Maybe he has learned, after six weeks.

They hold that shape for a while, as the pool empties and refills itself with people and drinks. Someone playing music through a phone speaker, something loud and punchy. After they’ve exhausted themselves with swimming lessons in the water, they trek back up through the wading pool to drip thick puddles over the brick beside their chairs. Someone turns the music down. Complaints from the women dancing. Percival calls over a boy in a white polo shirt and orders them drinks and food. He’s been here before, many times. He rattles items off the menu in his head, pauses.

“Do you like ketchup on your fries?”

“No.”

“No ketchup,” he instructs the pool boy carefully. “And I’d like to start a tab.” Credence watches him dig for the wallet in his discarded trouser pocket, slipping a plastic card into a black folder. His skin is beaded with pool water still, his nose dripping steadily onto his chest. Glows in the lamplight. The pool boy nods and repeats their order. “Perfect,” says Percival kindly. He speaks to the pool boy as gently as he does to Credence, like he’s being done a favour. He probably tips well, unlike Ma. 

At home, Credence thinks, Chastity will have waited resentfully at the bus stop to walk Modesty back. Ma will park up in a bad mood. She’d soured on him in the car when he had to ask for money for his lunch. He’d forgotten to buy a new loaf of bread. Fool boy. Sob sob, the same old story. He thinks with regret of the plastic bags in his trouser pocket, packed by habit with food from the restaurant bins. It will have gone bad by the time he gets back. He’ll have to toss it and find some new way through Sunday without anything at all.

When their order arrives, Percival nudges the flat of his knee against Credence’s thigh. They eat in silence, sat on the edge of Credence’s lounger, their elbows knocking. He lets Percival hand him things from the many plates and dictate how to eat and enjoy them. He wonders if his hair smells as strongly of chlorine as Percival’s does. Ma will ask. He’ll have to think up some lie. It doesn't seem as important now as it should be, or as it will be, later. The gaunt cows ate the fat cows, he thinks. The gaunt cows ate salad and went swimming in a pool. And then Pharaoh woke up and got a whipping from Mama. The God of the Bible was never a friend to firstborn sons. He presses a small cross from the tip of his thumb nail into his wrist, sorrier about the maudlin than the blasphemy. 

"Do you always think so much?" Percival asks. His hair sticking up in tufts over his forehead. Credence thinks that he looks like a boy. Maybe like the boy he was growing up in California, the way he’d told it, raising Hell on backwater suburban streets, sneaking onto construction sites to smoke drugs with his friends. He blinks a little when Credence reaches over to smooth down his hair, smiles around a mouthful of seared tuna. He leans in to kiss Credence’s wrist. He doesn’t ask. He never does, and Credence likes this, he thinks, more than anything else. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

>   
> For background info:  
> Face = Disney characters who are played by performers in costumes, with their actual faces. Like the princesses etc. Fur = Disney characters in complete fur costumes. Credence mostly plays Tigger at the Crystal Palace Restaurant in magic kingdom. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who took the time to leave kudos or a comment. Y'all keep me going. I guess this one gets a little cheesy, and a little sad, and a little soppy, but that's what we're all here for, isn't it?
> 
> Soundtracking:  
> "Post Tropical" - James Vincent McMorrow  
> "Outside, Digging" - James Vincent McMorrow
> 
> [Click for music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dngIUWNuk_g)

_Behold_ _,_ _it_ _was_ _for_ _my_ _welfare_ _that_ _I_ _had_ _great_ _bitterness_ _;_ _but_ _in_ _love_ _you_ _have_ _delivered_ _my_ _life_ _from_ _the_ _pit_ _of_ _destruction_ _,_ _for_ _you_ _have_ _cast_ _all_ _my_ _sins_ _behind_ _your_ _back_ _._

\- [Isaiah 38:17](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+38%3A17&version=ESV)

You can always tell which are the motel manager’s least favourite permanent residents. He’ll come to their doors only too eager on relocation days, wringing the duck tail of his blue polo shirt crumpled between flat hands, talking needs must. For those people, he never puts out his cigarette. He’ll blow thick clouds of menthol smoke right into the room at them. Watch them pack under his watery blue eye, stroke the dishwater moustache on his red face and warn them go easy on that bathroom door, mind. Warn them, “You break it you buy it.” And always laugh after. He’s the only one who takes joy from his laughter. It sounds like coughing.

For whatever reason, he’s taken a shine to Mary Lou Barebone, the mother with the three kids up in 43. It’s an odd choice. Lord knows she isn’t a stylish woman. Little plain-faced, scrubbed skin, no makeup. Friendly enough, though, and she pays on time. Early, even. Because of that, he gives her an extra half a day to get her affairs in order, knowing she’ll see herself out, likes her dignity. She’s uptight, he always thinks, whenever he sees her marching off to her car like queen ant herself, followed around like a shadow by the skulking boy in the funeral getup. The grown son of hers.

The grown son bothers him, he’ll have to admit. He liked the mother at once, but not the boy. Reedy, shifty boy. Queer as a two-headed penny. Too old to be living off his mother, the way he is. Reminds him of his eldest in prison, five years into a fifteen year sentence for holding up the Denny’s down the strip with a bb gun.

No good ever came to anyone raising a Mama’s boy, he always says now, and he means it. The boy he’s only too obliged to turn out once a month. He takes a special pleasure in holding open the car door for them all to pile inside, waving them off, and slamming the door in the boy’s thin, blank face.

“But, why do we always have to move out every month,” Modesty asks later, as they’re folding back the stiff coverlet on the bed she’ll share with Chastity in the purple motel down the road.

“Because, if they let us stay, well,” Credence shrugs. He still doesn’t understand for himself perfectly. He wouldn’t dare ask Ma. “Because it can’t be our home,” he says finally, rolling the coverlet into a lopsided tube and setting it aside for himself, to soften the floor later. “Give me one of those pillows, please,” he murmurs. Clicks his teeth. “And Ma said you have to wash up for lunch.”

He tucks the pillow and his coverlet into the closet, out of sight. Oversees Modesty scrubbing between her fingers in the bathroom without interest, rolling the thin skin over his wrist bone with the thumb of his other hand. His task for the rest of the day is to stay away from Ma. Do anything and nothing to avoid Ma’s notice.

He’d hoped to take advantage of the relocation flurry to slip down to the front desk and call Percival at work. Mutter something brief and dirty into the mouth of the phone with his hand over his own lips to muffle the sound, listen for the sharp crackle of Percival’s breath through the receiver, knowing he would be sat at his desk behind the computer screen, pretending to work. The girl at the counter here is nicer than the one at home and always lets him make calls for free. Says she likes to watch him shrug into the line. For whatever reason, she claims to like his awful haircut, too.

He likes to visit her. She works in the parks, but only seasonally, tells him about her worst shifts in the ten or so minutes he sees her each month. She likes his company, she says. He listens. He never interrupts or gives advice. Sometimes, she shares chips and gummy fruit with him from the vending machines and asks him questions about Percival while he pretends to be very interested in pamphlets on swamp tours and medieval castle themed dinner packages.

This time, Ma catches him at the door like the shepherdess on the hook with her, “Credence, where are you going?” Caught, he is forced to return to her. A muscle tugging at the bottom left corner of his lip. There are no kitchens in the rooms at the purple motel, unlike theirs. This one really is only for tourists. She installs him at the table beside the small microwave with knife and chopping board. Gives him her narrow-eyed disapproval on the thin lip of a frown. “I want you to stay in the room,” she says. “Until we leave here tomorrow, I don’t want anybody going out.”

She’ll forget about that later when she needs him to run to the car and fetch the bag from the trunk with her Bible. Flashbangs of a late summer storm rage out the window, coming down in sheets. He thinks she might feel sorry for whipping him after lunch, when he’d dropped the paper napkins and sent them flying out across the floor like snow from a roof. She catches him almost tender for a moment, looking over the angry lines on his wrist while she hands him the key. He holds himself still while she straightens his sleeve. She does the button for him and places her hand around his lower arm. He wants to lean in to that touch anyway, but he knows better. Her fingers are always colder than he expects them to be.

Then she returns his belt to him and tells him, “Hurry up.” Hollows him out with her frown. Nodding, he threads the belt back through the loops on his trousers and goes.

Unlike their motel, the stairs at the purple one are open to the elements. They run straight off the balcony to feed into the parking lot, connecting the squat ground floor to the one above with gum-flecked cement and rusted railings. Credence descends slowly, testing each step with the thin rubber sole of his black church shoes so he won’t slip. He does anyway, peeling through the parking lot, halfway to the trunk of the ancient Volkswagen Ma had procured seemingly from nowhere on their second day in Florida. It has a small hatchback trunk that just fits their spare belongings. He slots the key into the lock and lets the door swing open and hang there.

The rain has soaked through his suit and reduced the urgency of his errand. His sense of time. Ma will be watching from the window, he worries. But of course she will not be. Of course she has better things to do. He tries to picture Percival at his desk in the dry, watching through his window. Imaginary Percival is wearing his bathing suit from their date at the Grand Floridian, sees Credence and waves. Imaginary Percival is too cheerful. Makes his teeth ache. Wiping his cement scraped hands on his thigh, he finds the bag with the Bible, tucks it under his shirt for safety, and jogs back into the motel lobby.

Inside, the girl behind the counter pauses in raising a can of soda to her lips. She lowers it when she sees him. 

“Hey, you don’t have a dog, do you?”

He’d only intended to catch his breath before taking the stairs again, but her question stops him funny at the door. She’d heard something from outside the room earlier, weird sound. Whimpering, like a puppy. She has to remind them that there are no pets allowed. She doesn’t like to have to tell people off for breaking the rules. He sees it in the way she holds her lips thin and hard against her teeth, staring straight at him.

“Maybe it was the TV,” Credence says. He pretends to be busy, checking that the Bible is still dry in Ma’s bag, and doesn’t meet her eyes.

She was only bringing up towels for the room next door, she says, she hadn’t meant to eavesdrop. Wide eyed, tapping the rim of the soda can bubbling on the front desk. Probably the TV, she agrees. She watches him tug the cuff of his sleeve down over his wrist and then looks away pointedly. She’s always kind to him. He relents.

“How’s work?”

“Boring.” She smiles. “How’s your boyfriend?”

After they’d eaten at the hotel, Percival had followed him into a private bathroom and they had done everything that it was possible for two bodies pressed up against one another in a small space to do.

Credence shrugs. “We went on a date.”

“How’d it go?”

He pinches the skin of his bottom lip between two fingers. Raises one shoulder without dropping it, glancing out the window where the rain is beginning to let up. “He wants to take me out again,” he tells her, lowering his voice. “He likes me a lot.”

Love, Percival may have said. His exact word.

“Do _you_ like him?”

Credence pauses. The rain has stopped as abruptly as it had begun, just the roof dripping excess to be sponged up by the dark wet asphalt of the parking lot. Now he wishes that it would continue and give him a visible reason to leave when he says, “I have to go back upstairs soon.”

There’s a clatter from behind the desk, a chair scrape. Sets his heart pounding. He turns. She’s feeding a dollar into the slot in the machine beside the counter. He watches the coil twist over a chocolate bar. It gets stuck. She pounds on the machine with the heel of her palm, and it falls.

She tears the wrapper neatly in half. She holds it out to him over the desk alongside a towel, with her offer, “Come here and split it with me? Tell your mother I wanted to give you extra towels for your room.” It’s a good enough reason for Ma, he thinks. And she’s already whipped him once, so the odds of a second round in one day are low, close to none, even if he takes his time. He goes around the counter and takes the chocolate soft into his hand.

It’s sweeter than he expected. He licks it off the warbled skin of his palm, licks it waxen off the front of his teeth. He doesn’t say thank you. She stares out the window, chewing her own, biting her lip. If he had a camera, Credence thinks suddenly, he would take a photograph of her like that behind the desk, with her hand propped wistful under her chin and her hair wispy around the soft contours of her face.

Outside, a long engine whine. A car peels out of the parking lot. He rubs his eyes. He doesn’t know why he thought that. He’s never had a camera before, at any rate.

“Tell your mother to leave her key on the front desk when you go,” she says needlessly, catching him flushed, staring at the cuff of his sleeve.

She folds the wrapper into a neat rectangle and drops it in the wastepaper basket beneath the desk. Before he leaves, he kisses her cheek.

*****

They never venture far. It’s not the point. They don’t go into the parks, or anywhere they could be seen by people they know from work. They meet on the corner of the broad field by the Gaylord Palms, where Credence is less likely to be caught. Tear out onto the highway, pull up Percival’s long driveway, and fuck in his locked garage.

They do not go into the house. He never offers, and Credence never asks.

It’s better this way, Credence thinks. Anonymous, like. They go into the garage two unnamed bodies and come out Credence and Percival, fully dressed and their hair brushed out and the rest of the world no wiser to their game.

The outside of Percival’s house is clean and old-fashioned, grey-blue, two neat storeys under a peaked Victorian roof. A tidy front lawn with two small trees on either side, a cobbled path to the red front door lined by symmetrical hedges. Someone keeps it up that way. Someone Percival pays, maybe. They don’t discuss it. He lives in a pretty, clean little town full of leafy trees and flowers and charming little streets all lined with houses just like his.

He wasn’t lying, either, when he said it was close. Immediately across the strip from the gift shop where Credence stole the swimming trunks before their first date, lies the main road in and out. If he had shouted, he thinks, Percival might have heard him.

It bothers him that he hadn’t known.

*

“Credence, cut it out.” Percival swats at the top of his head, mussing his hair. “I’m serious.” He nudged Credence's cheek, leaning over him to reach the wheel as Credence trails his tongue over a square of skin there like he's teased to since they started to drive, when Percival tried to ask about his weekend  
“Hey, I said cut it out," Percival flicks the turn signal on, a hand in his hair. "You have to let me dri - ”

Through the windshield, brake lights flash red, horn blaring. The car jerks out of the right lane into the middle. Brakes screeching, it narrowly misses the back corner of a semi before righting itself. Percival’s fist balls on the wheel. Shaking. Knocks Credence off of his lap with contracted elbow.

“ _Goddammit_ , Credence, do you want me to crash the car?” He hits the wheel sharply, dislodging a yelp from the horn. The engine cuts over the grass on the shoulder and grinds to a halt. Percival takes Credence by the chin and kisses him hard, breathing heavy. He lets go. Scrapes a hand through his own hair. Zips up his fly. “I don't ask a lot, but do me the favour of not getting either one of us killed for the sake of - of road sex.”

He’s joking, sort of. It draws a laugh out of him that shakes weakly in the ensuing quiet. Credence watches his knuckles flex red-white over the wheel. He imagines Percival turning suddenly and smacking him on the mouth, where his lips still smart from kissing stubble. He licks his lips.

“Sorry,” he mutters.

He thinks to himself that he doesn’t feel sorry. Only dazed. Cotton candy-brained, watching Percival turn the key in the transmission and mouth ‘fuck’ as he pulls back out onto the empty highway. He thinks to himself that everything feels fake in Florida. Even Percival. Even the highway cows.

“We don’t have to have sex every second.” The car shudders a little as Percival slides into a higher gear. Lurches. “Fuck,” his thigh flexed, pushing down on the pedal so he can work the gear box smoothly into fourth. “I mean, I love it, don’t get me wrong - but we can talk, too,” he says. “I like talking to you, too, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” Credence says softly. He means it a little more than before. Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of Heaven _,_ he thinks _._ He glances at Percival’s knuckles on the wheel and presses the button on his window down until the window glass disappears into the sheathe of the door. This is a new car. The window slides down like a knife through hot wax.

“I’m not trying to make you sorry. Just don’t get us killed. Christ.”

In his peripheral, Percival’s eyes flicker back and forth, trying to catch his. Like two flies circling the kitchen table. Credence lays his hand on the outside of the door through the open gap of the window, feeling bold, and closes his eyes. Lets the wind rush violent over his fingers. Lets it ruin his hair, slap his cheeks ruddy.

After a while, he gets bored of this, self-conscious, and rolls the window back up. Without the roar of the wind around his ears, the car falls dead silent, sloping off the exit onto a backroad. Stopped at a light. Percival slides his hand across Credence’s lap and takes Credence’s hand there and squeezes it.

At work, they are completely professional. Sometimes Percival calls Credence into his office because Credence’s nose bled spontaneously in the middle of a set, or he wants to convince Credence to let him put a word in with some friends in casting for face, or just to say hello.

“If you paid any attention in ‘Tradition’, you’d know that I have to file paperwork when one of my character performers loses bodily fluids,” Percival says over the nosebleed to Credence, sat there scowling with a ball of tissue up his nostril. “Not like that, you smartass,” he says to Credence’s cocked eyebrow, and over Credence’s refusal of the offer for face he shakes his head simply and cannot understand not wanting to make more money.

Or: “Hello,” Credence says, always ducking back out the door after and clattering down the stairs.

At work, they are sometimes like strangers. Those times, Percival walks through the break room with a clipboard and does not even look at him. Unmoored, Credence finds himself wandering the restaurant floor on set with no particular rhythm, breaking all the rules he’d learned in training, signing autographs and doing greetings and pictures in whatever order he feels like. Higgledy-piggledy.

There’s a movie about his character, someone said, going off on a journey to find his family. Credence has never seen a cartoon movie, or any kind of movie. In the break room, they all treat this revelation as shocking, deep tragedy on a scale somewhere between the assassination of President Kennedy and the Crucifixion.

Once he knows the cartoon plot, he cannot shake it from the back of his brain. He approaches each table like they could be his. Looks very carefully into their faces through the beady eyeholes of his mask. The children and grandparents and infants and fathers and mothers. Particularly the mothers. He signs autographs, and takes photos, and strikes happy cartoon poses that his body outside of the costume would never dare affect.

He ticks them off against the list of criteria in his brain. They are not his family, because: They are in a theme park for fun. They wear brightly-coloured clothing. Their teeth are too even. They laugh too freely. They take too many beaming photographs. They kiss their children.

He returns backstage for his break and kicks his tiger-striped character shoe into a wall. He wishes he could hate them more than he does, but it’s like something inside him has been snapped, and he feels mostly tired.

He manages to sneak Modesty over to the giant orange just as the weather goes crisp in the mornings, the sun hiding longer behind a curtain of grey and pink sky, the spare grass along the highway glimmering with dew. Welcome relief of Floridian winter, weight of the heat lifted off their backs. Credence’s suit finally does not stick to his skin like a layer of paint to be peeled off before work, or evenings in the locked bathroom before the mirror. This is a celebratory pushing the limits of the rules. They walk there together, Modesty’s hand in his, taking turns drinking from a bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade he’d brought home from work.

The giant orange is only half of a fake orange built up like papier-mâché over the roof of a circular gift shop. It might be hollow inside. In certain spots, it dimples, pondering collapse. They’re both disappointed by its shabbiness, its lumpen misshapenness. It was more impressive from the highway, passing at speed, when all image is a little blurred and hides the uneven spinal arch sagging beneath its curves. Credence watches Modesty shield her eyes as she peers up at it. He follows her gaze over its flimsy skin, which has been bleached gold in spots by the sun.

The orange is tacky. Like most of the rest of the strip, it’s clearly a trap to make tourists spend money. As though to support this argument, crates of fruit and racks of cartoon-themed t-shirts stand in overpriced clusters all over the sidewalk by the front door.

They wander the aisles aimlessly, picking things up and putting them back down without bothering to check price tags. “My friend Miranda at school has a keychain on her backpack,” Modesty notes, dragging her fingers longingly through a display of them.

Credence follows the line of her hand through the rack. He lets her pick out a keychain dangling a stuffed orange from a cheap gold-link chain. “Go outside,” he tells her. He walks around the store three times, heartbeat pounding in his ears and stiff-limbed, pretending to look at souvenir mugs and t-shirts while she waits next a bin of fruit on the curb. His compromise with God: he will not let Modesty see him slide it into his pocket.

She still says anyway, “Thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not steal,” when he comes up running outside and slips it into her backpack.

“Those are almost at the end of the list,” Credence reminds her in return. It would be on his soul anyway. He reminds her of that too as he zips the backpack shut and helps her adjust it over her shoulders. “Still don’t let Ma see,” he says with a glance across the parking lot for good measure, “but if she does, tell her someone gave it to you at school.”

“I’ll tell her it was my prize for getting the top grade in math,” Modesty says.

He raises his eyebrows as they cross a weedy parking lot, en route to the giant ice cream cone, which had been next on her list. “Did you?”

“I did,” she says and shrugs, “but it was just a sticker, and it fell off on the bus.”

By the time they reach the giant ice cream cone, the weather turns again. Grey storm clouds hang ominously over its swirled tip, sweeping the air as though into an invisible box around them that fills with damp and heat. The ice cream cone is surrounded by picnic benches shaded by colourful umbrellas. There is a window in the centre beneath the lighted marquee advertising the brand ‘Twistee Treat’. From the window, a lit cigarette dangles off the end of a woman’s arm before disappearing back into the shady interior, trailing smoke.

The rising heat and the long walk over have turned Credence’s taste for ice cream into a deep longing for the motel room and a glass of water. For cold water, even his bedroll on the floor, he thinks, he would pay any price. What he would not give for a city bus to groan up the highway, pick them up, and deposit them in front of the motel’s broken signage without having to walk the entire way back.

He thinks that he was extremely foolish to have left New York so enthusiastically. His world has narrowed to this strip, this ugly stretch of highway and crabgrass where nothing grows and everything is junk and costs a lot of money. He fingers the two dollars in his pocket, which he’d held onto from the money that Percival had given him to cover his lie about working a double on their first date, months ago. He glances back at the window, where the woman’s arm is back to dangling. Curls of cigarette smoke, thunder overhead.

“Go and pick out your cone,” he tells Modesty, “and then we’ll have to - ” Lighting splits across the sky above them as he gestures overhead. Accentuation of their predicament. “We’ll figure it out,” he says hopelessly. They are a long walk from the dry safety of the motel.

He watches as Modesty picks her way up to the window, passes the money through, the cigarette and its arm disappearing. The arm is wearing a silver bracelet. When it returns, the cigarette is replaced by a mountain of chocolate and vanilla ice cream on a cone. He watches Modesty take it. Hesitating over her first lick, unsure where to begin. He thinks that none of them was ever any good at being a child. He doesn’t know how to mourn this, or if he should.

“It tastes sweet,” Modesty informs him. As though this was unexpected. She licks again, confirming. Gives him a thumb up. “It’s so big, I bet it melts before I finish it.”

“Don’t tell Chastity,” Credence warns her on impulse.

“She always tells Mama on you, but not on me,” says Modesty, licking. The ice cream has made her the chattiest she’s been. She reaches for Credence’s hand automatically to guide them back towards the roadway. “She told her when ya brought those waffles back and didn’t share ‘em with her. That was how come Mama knew, because Chastity told her. Except when she whipped you, Chastity said she only thought you’d have to go to bed without your supper, not get whipped. And then she felt sorry, and she told me not to tell you.”

“I know,” Credence lies.

“There’s a man waving at us from that car over there.”

“What?”

He follows the point of her ice-cream dripped finger to the highway and blanches.

“Does that guy know us?” Modesty asks. She has to jog to keep up with the pace he’s set back down the sidewalk, away from the black car with its windows rolled down. Each step jostles the icecream, threatens to dance it off the cone. God is forever coming to Ma, and the Devil to Credence. He glances over his shoulder.

The driver leans out through the passenger window, waving, “Credence, wait!”

“C’mon,” he tries to yank them both another step, but the car glides up to match their pace. Percival honks.

“Credence!”

“He knows your name,” Modesty says. Stops. Licking ice cream.

“Let’s just go home,” Credence tries, but Percival is flush with them now, frowning in confusion. Drumming his fingers over the passenger window. Heaving a sigh, Credence takes Modesty’s hand back in his and walks them both up to the curb.

Percival is not dressed for work. At least not as Credence has seen him at work, in his well-fitted shirts and slacks with the dorky lanyard and the single Star Tours pin he concedes to wearing because it was a gift from the same mysterious giver of the mouse bobblehead on his desk. His face is unshaven. He runs a hand messy through his hair and lays it on the wheel. The picture of idleness in a t-shirt and sporty pants as he leans out the window.

Smirking, “You want a ride? About to pour.”

Overheard, thunder confirms this. He unlocks the doors with a click and says nothing when Credence slides into the back seat beside Modesty.

“Were you following us?” Modesty wants to know as soon as the car shifts into gear.

“Only Credence.”

“Why were you following Credence?”

“Because I know him from work,” Percival says. When they stop at a red light, he turns to wink at her. “How do _you_ know Credence?”

“I live with him,” Modesty says. She takes a large bite of ice cream and kicks her legs out over the seat. Shrugs Credence off when he tries to scrub a dot of chocolate from her collar with paper napkin. “He’s my brother - leave me alone, Credence - so, we live together. At home.”

All at once, the rain drops out of the sky as through a trap door. It must be close to five, Credence thinks. He stuffs a napkin into Modesty’s hand and models wiping his own chin for her to follow. The rain pelting the car in bullets. He watches Percival’s knuckles on the wheel and then looks away.

“I didn’t know that Credence had a sister,” Percival says. He very studiously does not look at Credence through the rearview mirror. Smiles at Modesty when they stop at another light. Flicks the AC dial up so that it blasts the backseat with cool air.

“He has two. Me and Chastity.”

“You and Chastity, and a mother,” Percival repeats patiently. “And you all live very close to me. I was just on my way back home from the gym.”

“I have a gym at my school,” Modesty says. She crunches half of her empty cone in one go. Swallows quickly against the race to be the next one to speak, before Percival can gather a response or Credence can stop her. Credence is not a talker, and he never has anything interesting to say. Not as interesting as her Florida school, with the cafeteria and the rows of desks she gets to sit in and the big gym where they play dodge ball on Tuesdays. She has already decided that she likes this Percival man for driving them, and for his fancy car. “At school we play dodge ball - and I always am on Miranda’s team, because she’s my best friend - ”

At her side, Credence holds up his hand, but she ignores him. Stuffs the rest of the cone into her mouth. Credence never went to school. He’s stupid, Mama says. He failed at homeschool, but Mama would have whipped him anyway, she thinks, because that’s how it always is with Credence. She does not relay any of this to Percival, but she lets Credence holds her hand with one hand while his other toggles the button for the window, sending it up and down.

“I’m the best one in FCAT math,” she brags, watching rain spatter the armrest where Credence’s window goes up. “And I got a keychain for it. Miranda’s really jealous because she’s not good at math, only reading, but I told her don’t be jealous, because her parents have, like, three cars, and they take her to Universal every weekend, and she has her own pool.”

“When I was a kid,” Percival agrees, “all of my coolest friends had pools, too. It was a very big thing to have a friend with a pool.”

“Yeah-huh.” Window down.

“Modesty, don’t say ‘yeah-huh’.”

Window up.

“I think we’re close,” Percival says. He tries to catch Credence’s eye in the rearview mirror, but Credence is staring at his own finger on the window button. Climbing the window back up until it seals itself with a squelch. Dragging it down.

Rain bends arcs around the nose of the car as it whines to a stop in the motel parking lot. He yanks the button up, watching the window mirror this gesture.

Percival, from the front seat: “This is where I leave you.”

“I’m going upstairs,” Modesty announces into the silence. “I’m gonna tell Mama that you had to stop by the front desk.” She pats Credence’s hand on her way out. All little Mother again. Already aware at nine that her sway in the family is greater than his. Puts a sour taste in his mouth. He watches her jog across the parking lot and take the stairs in twos. Race down the balcony. Knock and slip in through the front door.

“Your sister’s a trip.”

The seat leather relinquishes Percival with a squeak. He offers Credence a smile that is not returned. Dies on his lips and stays there. Like a shade, Credence thinks. Or a fossil. He sighs.

“Look, if I overstepped - ”

Credence shakes his head. He makes himself shake his head, smile a painful little smile that pulls in tight on the corners of his mouth, making creases. “Thanks for the ride,” he says. His throat is dry. He sounds like a frog. “Modesty likes to talk,” he says. “She likes meeting new people.”

“Not a trait you two share.”

He looks up to check; Percival is smiling, too. At ease. Elbow slung over the top of the wheel. Relieved, Credence leans up over the console between the front seats and kisses his cheek.

“I have to go and make a call in a minute,” Percival says spitty against the side of his mouth, warm breaths puffing over Credence’s ear. Credence pulls back. His heart pounds, scanning the balcony, but the curtains to their room are drawn as tightly as ever.

Some new boldness sweeps over him. Incomprehensible, mildly suicidal. He leans in and takes Percival’s tongue in his mouth and sucks on it. Holding on to the shoulders of both seats, fingers dug in for balance.

They kiss like that as rain pelts the roof of the car, echoing tinnily overhead. Like so many little knocks. Swapping tongues, tracing Percival’s lower lip with his while Percival makes little noises, mewling. Ma is just upstairs and could look out and see him at any time. Credence does not look. He would not like to think about what would happen then. It makes him dizzy.

“I really do have to make a call,” Percival says, points out the window as he pulls himself away. He catches Credence’s face in his hand and pecks at his frown. Presses a consolatory kiss to the tip of his nose. “You should run up while it’s kind of dry. Forecast said rain all night. I’m glad I saw you when I did.”

Ma accepts the discovery of Modesty’s keychain with about as much of a fuss as she makes over the first prize in math. Which is to say, they go over largely tolerated but ignored. Worldly achievements have never mattered to her, but she doesn’t punish for them, either.

It’s to all of their luck that the construction of the first floor of the new church has put her in a glowing mood. She says nothing but “mend it” when Chastity burns a hole in the hem of her best dress while ironing, and she doesn’t comment at all on Credence’s lag in following Modesty up the stairs. The excuse about needing to go in to the lobby for a word is taken for dogma. She does not hover while they fold laundry, or correct Modesty on her homework. Her psychic presence in the room, usually a weight on all of them, is largely absent.

When Credence drops his fork dirty on the floor in the middle of dinner, Chastity shifts in her seat. Modesty stares hard into her plate. Credence waits, holding his breath, but Ma is not herself. She does not tell him to get up and go to bed, or to wait for her in the bathroom until after. Her fuse is all put-out steam and no smoulder. She lets him pick the fork up again, wipe it off, and continue eating before slapping him soundly across his cheek. He thinks to himself before falling asleep that he cannot remember getting off so lightly in years.

The following afternoon, he meets Percival in the field across from the Gaylord Palms. They have worked their pickups into a neat routine. Percival just tapping the break to slow the car to a crawl so that Credence can jump into the backseat on the driver’s side and climb up over the centre console. He laughs and shoves Credence’s face out of his neck as they tear off through the light, over the intersection and down the road.

There’s a heavy, damp smell to the air outside. The weather can’t make up its mind, wants to be England, cool and rainy. Wants to scorch. Percival suggests they go into the backyard this time as he parks at the mouth of his garage.

“I have a nice backyard,” he promises. “We don’t have to go inside the house at all, if you don’t want to.”

One of them is holding the other back from that final threshold, but Credence is never sure which he is. Sometimes he thinks that he would like to sit inside or fuck on Percival’s couch. He thinks he would like to wake up naked in Percival’s bed, twisted into a sheet, calling out that it smells like coffee in the kitchen while Percival laughs from down the hall. It would be cool in the AC, away from the mosquitos which have taken to his skin like candy, and they would feel like a real thing then. The solidity of that terrifies him. But then, Percival never truly offers, either, he thinks. An impasse.

The backyard is a new intermediary. He tugs on his lip, considering. There’s no real risk in a backyard that isn’t already inherent to a car in a garage. He shrugs. Nods and lets Percival lead him by the hand around the garage, through doorway hidden in the framework of a white gate too tall to look over.

“I’ll go inside and get us some drinks,” Percival says. “You hungry?”

He disappears before Credence can answer. Leaves Credence perched nervously on the edge of a padded deck chair on the tile deck in the centre of the yard, boxed in by floral trees. Everything is lush, despite the fact that it should be deep winter. The white flowers on the trees fill the entire yard with light perfume. Credence follows them around the perimeter with his eyes.

A grill tucked against the back wall of the house gives him a start. He’d never really considered the probability of Percival having other friends. Having grill parties and inviting people over who wouldn’t hesitate like vampires over the threshold to his back door. This thought rests uneasily in the hollow spot just bellow his ribs as he waits.

The door to inside groans again and swings open. Percival cuts across the lawn bearing two glasses and a bottle on a tray, pretending to worry over, “It’s a little early to drink.” He pours out anyway. The motion draws Credence’s attention to his wrist, heavy with silver watch. Dressed for work again, or somewhere nicer, though his cufflink has been removed and the cuff rolled neatly up his forearm, exposing hair. “I hope it’s okay to say that I liked meeting your sister yesterday,” he says. Sets a squat, cut glass of something in front of Credence that is not wine. “I didn’t realise you had siblings so much younger than you.”

At a loss for explanations, Credence takes his glass and sips. The liquor inside is surprisingly sweet. He runs his tongue over his teeth and frowns at the sweetness. It doesn’t strike him as the kind of thing that Percival, with his thick wristwatch and his boxy German car, would drink on his days off.

“It’s some kind of honey liquor-thing,” Percival laughs at this observation. He sets the tray onto a table between their chairs and sits back grandly, arms over armrests. Like a king. “I didn’t buy it, but I thought it might be less traumatising to your palate than whiskey.”

“Do you always think so much about me?”

Credence hadn’t meant to ask that question out loud. It stutters out a needy little vibration of air waves between them. Arms out childishly in longing. He watches Percival’s lips curl up around the rim of his glass. They are not drinking the same drink, he notices.

“I try to,” Percival says at last. There is something else that he does not say but holds on his tongue like an egg as he sets down his drink. Pulls his mouth into odd shapes. “It’s kind of an intrinsic part of it, I think,” Percival says. Clears his throat. “Of loving someone. Putting thought into the things you do around them. What you say and what you don’t say.”

A breeze sifts through the flat leaves of the floral trees. Shakes up the air in the backyard, lets the heat out out of Credence’s collar so all that he feels left is cool sweat on the back of his neck. He takes another sip of his sweet honey liquor-thing and tries to imagine the face of the person who bought it, if Percival didn’t. Maybe a guest from a backyard barbecue. A friend or an ex-lover.

Credence glances at Percival, occupying the whole of his chair. Fills every space, like gas. He imagines another hand on Percival’s face, over his oddly hairless chest. Another face in his neck. Then he rubs the image out of his eyes in confusion and sits up straight in his chair, not as bothered by the idea of Percival’s ex-lovers as he thought he would be.

“Modesty liked you,” he says quietly.

Percival smiles. “Your mother has very, ah, unique taste in names.”

“We’re adopted.”

The smile sticks. “Oh.”

“When I was born - ” Credence picks up his glass by the thick rim. He drops his knuckle into it. Swirls the drink sticky around the wrinkled skin on the joint. Licks it off with the point of his tongue. “My mother used to work in a hospital in the city a long time ago. When the city was bad. She was in a religious order. Nurse.” He pauses. These are the first real details about himself that he's given up willingly. He feels the pressure of Percival’s eyes on the top of his head and shrugs automatically. Dislodging him. “They brought a woman in who had - a cab hit her. She’d probably jumped in front of it. She was badly hurt, so they had to deliver her baby in the operating room before they could fix her. And when she died, and my mother found out that there was no one else but the state left to take the baby - she said God came to her.” Credence sets his drink back on the table. The breeze stills to a rustle in the trees. The idea of finishing the story is suddenly unbearable to him. He looks away. “And she left the order and adopted me. She named me Credence, because she listened to God, so I always should, too. God is good.”

“God is good,” Percival echoes. 

The yard is evening quiet. Somewhere in the hedges, a lonely cicada buzzing. Without warning, Percival leans towards him over the table. He knocks the bottle onto its side and rights it. Catches Credence’s bottom lip on the hook of his thumb, turns his face, presses it white, flat.

“The first time I met you.” Holds his thumb there, tracing the ridge of outside lip, dry. Inside lip. Licks his own pink, the tip of his tongue. “Felt like somebody had set it up, somehow. Somebody setting me up. Couldn’t believe they sent you to me in a tiger suit with that face. Couldn’t believe the audacity when you said those things in my office.”

He draws his hand back into his lap and drinks. Watches Credence lick the numb spot where his finger had been. Watches Credence raise his hands to his lips and pinch there until the skin needles.

“Sometimes, I think even you don’t believe your own audacity,” Percival says, “and sometimes, I think - something is wrong with you, but it’s not as bad as you think it is. Whatever made you think whatever it is, you have a sweetness in you, too. Makes it easy to like you.”

“I’m not going to tell you that I love you now,” Credence tells him, “just because you’ve figured me out, or something.”

His joke lands sideways, flat on its ass. He feels winded. Watches Percival hover unlaughing over the rim of his glass. Counting over his words before he says, “There’s no pressure for you to tell me that now or ever, Credence.”

He is being childish. Percival is soppy romantic, he thinks. Not at all what Credence expected on the first day, with the computer between them, when he’d decided to take his chances with the manager who looked too hard and too often and too eagerly into his face, spout out the dirtiest thing he could think of and see what happened next.

“I do, though.” He doesn’t look up. He reaches for Percival’s glass and takes it out of his hand and drinks, barely tasting. Something bitter. Lets it wash over his tongue. Saturate it. Somehow the first button had been so much easier to push than this one. When all he was risking was losing his job. “I’m not going to say it,” he says, “but I do.”

“You’re such a brat,” Percival says, breaking the sobriety of the moment. A mosquito buzzes lazily over his hand. He swats it and laughs.

“But with a sweetness in me,” Credence reminds him. “Makes it easy to like me.”

He clings on to the glass when Percival leans to take it back from him. Forces both of their bodies to rise and meet in the middle. Grinning at Percival’s moon face in the gathering dark. All of the heaviness has gone out of him with the death of daylight behind the final cloud on the horizon and Percival's laughter. He's surprised by his own giggling. He sounds younger to himself. He glances up at the sky. 

“You love me,” Credence says, testing the words in his mouth. Trying them on, surprised to find that they fit.

He thinks that it’ll be lucky with Ma, coming home after curfew. She’ll be so focused on punishing him for his lateness that she won’t pay attention to anything else. Miss the antiseptic smell of the alcohol on his breath. He feels giddy.

“God knows why,” Percival says. He pries Credence’s finger stiff off the edge of the glass and drains it.

“God is good.”

“Yeah.” Smacking his lips. “You have a heartbreaking origin story, you know. _Finding_ _Nemo_ plot stuff _._ Part of me still thinks this might be a set-up.”

“I hope I’m being paid well for it.”

“Mhm,” Percival agrees. He sets his glass back onto the table. He takes Credence’s chin between two fingers and tugs it close. “I hope you are, too, lover boy. You pull it off beautifully.”

The drive back is empty road, fast. Percival’s hand in Credence’s lap, glancing at him at red lights. They’re both happy. Laughed out, flushed from everything they’d done in the grass in Percival’s backyard. On the chairs in Percival’s backyard. With Percival’s hand down Credence’s pants on their stumble to the car.

It’s never dark on the strip. Rainbow lights flash by over the window as on a screen. Too many. Pinwheel dizzy. They are both happy. It’s such an odd feeling, sharing happiness with someone, Credence thinks. He has shared misery and small comfort and relief, but never happiness with another soul. The warmth from this fills his belly all the way back through the parking lot and up the stairs. Carried by it, this sungold. Bleaches out every other colour, the deep of the night sky, the green and orange flashing on the broken motel sign. He hears Ma rising to meet him from behind the door. Her lips thin. He is not worried. He made his peace. He goes inside with his fingers already unworking the buckle of his belt at his waist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Percival drove after drinking. Don’t do this obviously!


	3. Sometimes it causes me to tremble

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so, this was going to be the third and final chapter but became very long, so I have split it into two. The fourth instalment will be posted within a week. It's already plotted and begun and just needs to be finished. The fourth chapter really will be the final one.
> 
>  **This one is angsty.** The next will be even angsty-er. The ending, will, I promise, be good, and there is a short sequel side-fic planned for just after that. Warnings for this chapter include "plot twists", which are already written into the tags (please check), and Mary Lou Barebone being Mary Lou Barebone. I really hope you enjoy and always always appreciate even a short little comment letting me know that I am not sending these words from myself out into the void. <3

After the construction of the bottom floor, the new church shoots up like weeds. Ma drives them over to see it on Monday after work, speeding down the highway with Modesty holding her backpack on her knees in the backseat, stuffed orange keychain swinging as the car weaves through traffic.

Ma’s good mood at the church’s progress overlays all like spilled honey. She is Rebecca with the water and they, thirsty desert beasts, lapping up her almost-kindness when she lets them roll the windows down in the car, Modesty riding wind with the flat of her palm. She even smiles tolerantly once they hit their exit and lets Credence slide the tape they brought down from New York into the noisy car stereo, _What_ _a_ _Friend_ _We_ _Have_ _in_ _Jesus_ _._

They’ve had the tape for as long as Credence can remember, worn through on all the songs he used to listen to religiously as a little boy, so that only the titular song plays now without warbling, and poorly at that. Sometimes, when they hit a patch of rough highway too, the car jostling makes the tape stretch; the piano goes off-tune.

Credence lets the piano wash over him, delicate, tangled up in wind from the open window. In the church at home, Ma always did the piano after supper on a Sunday. Let them all stand around to sing if they wouldn’t dance. As soon as anyone danced, the performance was over, and it was time for chores.

The rhythm picks up with the chorus. He watches his right hand tap-tapping the door in the wing mirror. He’s always just slightly off beat. Enough to draw her eyes sideways to stare at his hand until he yanks it back into his lap, still, and rolls the window shut. Her eyes return to the road, still smile-narrowed. They’re all singing, Chastity and Modesty, even Ma. Credence only quietly and then, off-pitch. He watches Modesty through the rearview mirror, rocking the backpack on her lap, the keychain. Her chest heaves because she always sings her hymns at top volume. The only time when any of them is allowed to make so much noise.

Credence wonders if he ever sang loud and clear-voiced like her. Maybe he would have been the kind of person who could tell Percival that he loves him, if he had. He knows that Percival wants it badly. Maybe will not wait around much longer, if Credence keeps taking his time, but the words have lost themselves somewhere on the underside of his tongue and will not come out.

When that song ends, they plough through a worn-tape distortion of _The_ _Old_ _Rugged_ _Cross_ _,_ the car shuddering to a halt in clouds of construction dust which refuse to settle after. The dust cuts up in his throat as he follows Ma to the arched doors, which she unlocks with a slender key on the keyring. Standing proudly under the lintel, “Come in, come inside,” gesturing them through.

The walls of the new church are still cement block, heavy and bare. Half-built, but growing every day, Ma says. She smiles as she drags them down the line of pews in the nave to the raised dais of the chancel. The unfinished church walls gape heavenward overhead. Between them and the sky, a magnolia branch hangs spectral in the empty space, where a roof should be.

Ma, when she catches him looking, says, “We’re going to have that cut down. That’s where we’re going to hang the cross.”

“It’s beautiful,” Chastity replies by rote.

Mostly, Credence remembers suddenly, he’d listened to the tape on his own while Ma was away evangelising. He’d steal away up into the rafters, rewind and replay, hugging the tape player like a baby to his chest, letting it fill up the whole of the church, Chastity singing, _Credence_ _-_ _grievance_ _come_ _-_ _to_ _-_ _Jesus_ _!_ _sinned_ _-_ _in_ _-_ _Eden_ _,_ _demon_ _-_ _demon_ _!_ _he_ _never_ _laughs_ _!_ _he_ _never_ _sings_ _!_ _he_ _’_ _s_ _never_ _well_ _!_ _he_ _’_ _s_ _goin_ _’_ _to_ _Hell_ _,_ _o_ _Lord_ _!_ Telling someone, Credence is bad, bad boy, while he watched from overhead and Chastity danced like a feather in the dust beneath the leaded window in the apse.

He blinks at her. She catches him looking and frowns, presses her lips together and clasps her hands in front of her long skirt. Looking at her properly, Credence can see the red lines along her lower lashes, the splotches on her cheeks that always give her away when she’s been crying. He copies her in folding his hands, but he has no skirt to hide them in, holds them awkwardly in front of his body. 

“Once the roof goes on the house,” Ma says, “we’ll be able to move in, and everything will be like it was in New York.”

She is too busy staring up at the magnolia branch, no doubt pencilling a date for its scheduled amputation in her mind, to notice Modesty clambering up one of the pews over her shoulder. Jumping, stumbling, caught by Chastity, who scolds her with a silent finger and yanks her off to the far end of the chancel before Ma sees and it ruins her mood.

“Everyone will have their own room again,” Ma promises, ending her study of the branch and bending to take the keys back out of her purse. Over the open roof, a cardinal swoops wide-winged. It sits on the ledge and beaks through its feathers delicately until Ma shoos it off. Credence stands in the shadow beneath the gaping window at her back and scrapes his shoe in the dirt.

She’s so pleased, she stops for pizza on the way home. It’s such a rare treat that none of them quite knows how to eat it, mouse-nibble up to the greasy crust. Ma lets Modesty pick out a little knot of garlicky bread and keep her eyes open saying grace. She eyes Credence but says nothing when he reaches into the box and takes a second slice, even tells him take the extra to work tomorrow for his lunch, so he will not have to ask her for his money.

None of the normal rules seem to apply when she is like this. Beaming at them all, speaking in her honeyed Sunday-school teacher voice, granting privileges. It cuts stark contrast to her fouler moods of late, and that makes Credence nervous. He’s almost relieved to be carrying the pizza box broken down in folds to the dumpsters after, order given over the roar of the shower, through the bathroom door.

Once downstairs, he lobs the box into the dumpster and takes off for the purple motel at a jog. Ma is bathing, which buys him, at best, ten minutes. He knows better than to dally now. The last time, she’d waited for him on the top step, all hard eyes and wet hair, and there had been no excuse that could have changed her mind. She’d seen him standing behind the dumpster anyway, watching the fireworks. He quickens his step. The night air is brisk and dry. Tugs a cough from his lungs that leaves his chest aching in a funny way, even after he slows down. He rubs his chest.

Tina from the front desk is just leaving her shift as he draws near, but she holds the door open for him, wincing at his shoe screen over the tile floor. She always waits a little after the end of her shift to shut down anymore, just in case. He wants to thank her. She’s cut her hair shorter, like a boy. He thinks that it looks good and tells her that instead. His shoe catches over the edge of the rug, and he stumbles wide-armed and gangle legs into the desk. “Sorry, sorry - ” She squeezes his shoulder as she shows him how to twist the lock from inside of the back door before she leaves.

Percival’s voice comes through the line in a hail of static. Something sporty on the television in the background. Once, Credence remembers, he’d mentioned enjoying football. That was a long time ago, the first date at the pool. Percival tells him to hang on a minute, and the sport something cuts out. His voice echoes like he’s standing in a bathroom.

“Okay, what’s up?”

“Pick me up tomorrow,” Credence says breathlessly.

“What? I thought we said next Tuesday.”

“Tomorrow,” Credence insists. The static crackles. He pinches his lip and rubs his sternum, where the pain is still sharp from running. “If you’re not busy,” he adds. There’s a gum ball machine on the wall beside the automat where Tina buys them chocolate on move-out days. He wonders if Percival would give him a quarter if he asked for one. If he said it was for gum, it would seem harmless, and Percival might.

Seconds ticking by on the clock overhead. The pause stretches from awkward to long. He begins to worry that Ma will be wondering where he’s gone off to, that she may be finished bathing already. He twirls his finger around the phone cord, shakes the phone over the desk, like that’ll do anything, and presses it back against the side of his face. “Are you there? There’s somewhere I want to take you.”

“I’m here.” It’s static, Credence thinks, that sounds like Percival’s voice. Or Percival’s voice that sounds like static. Something is wrong. When he asks if something is wrong, Percival says, “No - no. Yes. I just - something came up this week, Credence, and I won’t be at work. But I’ll see you next Tuesday, like we planned.”

“What came up?”

“Tell you later,” Percival answers, his voice hushed, like he doesn’t want to be overheard. “I’ll miss you until Tuesday. You can take me to that place then,” he says.

“Okay.”

“I love you,” Percival says softly.

Credence hangs up.

They had discovered quickly that Kissimmee, unlike the city, has no regular bus service, just a handful of disjointed lines with as few connections as stations. Cost almost as much as the gas roundtrip to the cast member parking lot where Ma drops him off in the blinking early-morning pallor of the overhead lamps to wait for his shuttle. She does it reluctantly, because he brings in enough money to offset the annoyance, but only so. Still sucks in the air around her teeth at his shilly-shallying for his ID lanyard, and guns it out almost as soon he’s tugged the door shut behind him.

Credence lays his temple flat against the handrail on the cast member bus as it sways down the hill to the mouth of the Magic Kingdom tunnel. It’s the closest thing to a city bus that he’s found in Florida yet, same shape and all. Same ambling slowness and screech of brakes when it docks up at the station, only limited to this short stretch between the parking lot and the park.

Credence climbs out slowly, blinking in the fresh daylight. Without Percival waiting in his office, his routine remains stubbornly the same. Costuming. Babs. Yes, ma’am, no ma’am. Take his sack with the dumb heavy cartoon tiger costume back to the entertainment desk, slapping at his calves. Get his warm-up time. Walk to set.

The fact that Percival will not be waiting in his office does not change his walk time from the break room to the restaurant floor at nine-thirty. It doesn’t stop the twins in matching mouse t-shirts from jumping on his back so that he nearly upsets a towering plate of waffles in escaping them. Or the father with the moustache from grabbing a fistful of striped tiger shoulder as Credence is moving on to the next table, demanding more photographs to offset the amount he’s paid for his teary-eyed family brunch, tragedy for which he is holding Credence personally responsible.

A glance down the restaurant tells him that the attendant is on the far side of the room, helping the donkey navigate its way through a tight spot between tables and utterly useless to him. The restaurant is midday packed, cheerful music overlaying the scrape of silverware over sturdy porcelain dishes and the crying of children tired of sitting politely at the table. Credence does another photograph in the father’s requested pose and gets a heavy clap on the shoulder in thanks. He wants to clap his tiger hand back, lean in and whisper something, the way that he imagines Percival would. His shoulder throbs from all their rough handling. Instead, he folds into his own head and counts the minutes in daylight through the south-facing window until he can clock out.

The restaurant shift runs on perpetual loop, like the old tape. Take out, flip. Rewind to replay. After an hour or so, all of the children begin to blend into the same spoiled Devil child. Even the shy and good ones. All of the parents deform into the same fleshy face attached to a camera lens. Credence kicks his tiger shoes into the walls when he comes in off the restaurant floor. With nothing better to do, he sleeps in the black canvas costume sack on his breaks between sets, tucked into a corner. He sketches out the notes for the tape songs in his head, _Were_ _You_ _There_ _(_ _When_ _They_ _Crucified_ _My_ _Lord_ _)_?

One of the donkeys is heat sick ruddy and going home. Credence watches her swaying by the door as a manager that is not Percival looks at something on a clipboard. He watches resentfully. Both the sick donkey and the not-Percival have long necks and hair like limp straw, almost as though they are related.

He goes back onto set and comes off sweaty and lies down in his character sack. He reasons to himself that it’s too soon for Percival to have stopped loving him. It is too soon, but for whatever reason he has to think then about Chastity on the construction site, standing Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross near the pews. Crossing her hands into her skirt. He thinks about the old rhyme game they used to taunt each other with before Modesty was there, in the back of the church where their voices always echoed, pinching each other on a knee or an elbow, _Chastity_ _-_ _blasphemy_ _toothy_ _-_ _got_ _-_ _a_ _-_ _cavity_ _,_ _died_ _-_ _and_ _-_ _went_ _-_ _all_ _-_ _maggoty_ _,_ _Lordy_ _-_ _what_ _-_ _a_ _-_ _tragedy_ _!_

Credence’s rhymes were always better than hers. She was always crying when she lost, puffy ugly face, but she’d stop whenever there were others there to see. Tell them Credence was bad, bad boy, and, dancing, tug his dark hair, _demon_ _-_ _demon_ _,_ until he shouted at her and knocked hymnals wind-mill from the pew-backs. She was the sorest loser, even Ma would whip her for it whenever she went snitching on him. But he’d be waiting in the chancel outside of Ma’s bedroom door too, and she’d pinch his elbow on her way out, cackling, _Credence_ _-_ _grievance_ _,_ _down_ _-_ _in_ _-_ _the_ _-_ _crypt_ _,_ _wasn_ _’_ _t_ _-_ _good_ _-_ _for_ _-_ _mama_ _-_ _now_ _-_ _he_ _’_ _s_ _-_ _gon_ _-_ _na_ _-_ _get_ _-_ _whipped_.

He knows it’s too soon for Percival to have stopped loving him, but something else could still happen. Affection fatigue. He opens a bottle of Gatorade from the pallet beside him and drinks lying down. He thinks that he isn’t sure how love works, after all, and he’s often wrong, Credence-grievance. Stupid-head. Can barely remember to buy himself a loaf of bread and peanut butter on Saturdays for his lunch through the week, even though Mama gives him grocery money. Can’t even call his lover ‘love’.

Crash-car-Credence, crash the car trying to put Percival on his tongue where words should be. Ma would say, we’re going to have that cut out. That’s where we’re going to hang the cross. At this thought, Credence laughs so violently that he has to sit up, Gatorade burning in his nose.

It’s dark early when Ma pulls into the cast member parking lot to pick him up, the cold just shy of freezing like none of them had expected when they’d left their winter gear in New York. Without snow, she will not buy him a coat. The season is too short. He has to jog out to her from the bus stop with his arms wrapped around his ribs for warmth, ducking under swarms of gnats in the lamplight.

As he’d expected, their good spell has run dry. Credence can feel the anger rolling off her almost as soon as he opens the door. He sits but doesn’t do his buckle, rubbing his stiff hands together instead, blowing on his fingers. Ignoring him, she throws the car in gear and peels out.

She never hits in the car, but he finds himself watching her hands out of an abundance of caution, anyway. Traffic is slow this time of evening. Drags by through his window, even with her weaving tricks. A flicker of motion catches him at stand-still for a red light. She leans over the wheel to turn on the radio, twists the dial harshly so that the sound blares, turns it back off. He sits back again. She never hits in the car.

“There’s not going to be any dinner when we get home,” she says at length, in answer to a question he didn’t ask.

“Yes, Ma.”

He wipes his nose on the back of his hand, cold runny, and hides it in his lap when she glances at him. “Who was hanging on the cross next to Christ?” she asks unexpectedly.

He hesitates. “Gestas and Dismas.”

“Why?”

“Because they were thieves,” Credence says, watching her knuckles tap the indicator signal, yellow-white, bone through skin. He wonders what the rules are to this new game, if he is already losing. He probably is. He adds, “Impenitent thieves.”

“What does that term mean to you, Credence,” - switching lanes - “‘impenitent thieves’?”

Credence tries to remember if he’d helped himself to anything in the motel that week. This is a new line of inquiry for her, one without a script for him to follow. Thinking, he rests his palms flat over his knees, biting his lip and the inside of his cheek.

The problem is that it could be anything, with Ma. Delayed retribution for the second slice of pizza, maybe. Took too long coming back up from the washing machine when he did their sheets. As a kid it was always the way that he folded his hands during prayers, or didn’t fold them, or said ‘free’ instead of ‘three’ on the cross and embarrassed her.

“Open up the glove compartment,” she says. He glances at her, but she is watching the rear end of the truck in front of them. Always too close. Riding their ass, Percival calls it. Percival does it, too. It’s one of the few, jarring similarities between them. Credence sucks his bottom lip in between his teeth as he pries open the glove compartment. “Do you recognise those?” 

She knows he does. Though it turns his stomach to look, he doesn’t dare shut the compartment door where it flaps loose like a gummy jaw from the underside of the dashboard. He doesn’t reach in, either. She’s folded the swim shorts carefully into a flat parcel. Bright, sickening orange parcel on top of the pamphlet for AAA. He does recognise them, he admits.

“Where did you get them?”

Because he is caught, Credence turns his head to search her face, shadowed profile lit up from both sides in stripes of passing highway lamp. She glows. Not looking at him. She is watching the broken taillight of the truck, riding its ass. Righteous angel, bottom jaw pressed firmly into top, angrier than he’s seen her in months. No mercy for him, then. Her set jaw always prophecies swift and violent retribution. The shorts make him itch, skin-crawling orange. He doesn't want to look at them anymore. 

“From the gift shop, Ma.” He snaps the glove compartment shut. 

She puts the turn signal on and swings wide around the nose of the truck. “Did you buy them?”

“No, Ma.”

“Did you take them without paying?” He did. Of course he did. She has all of his money. “Was Modesty there?” He places his hands back onto his knees, a palm for each, squeezing. She was. “Did Modesty see you take them without paying?” Yes. Ma nods sharply. “Modesty told me that she stole them for you,” she says. He swallows. “Do you remember Matthew 18:6?”

“Whoever humbles himself like a little child is the greatest in the kingdom -”

“That’s 18:4. 18:6: But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble - ” She is too angry to complete the quote, but he remembers now. Something about millstones and drowning. They had written it on the chalkboard in Sunday school. The indicator clicks. Ma pulls into the motel parking lot and unclips her seatbelt. “Go upstairs and wait for me in the bathroom,” she says without looking at him or releasing the seatbelt into its holder. “You have taken up a lot of my time already, and I have work to finish before I can deal with you.”

“Ma -”

Her hand on his wrist startles him. Startles her too. She lets go quickly and licks her lips, but they are still hard at the edges, as though someone has penciled them on in thick graphite and forgot to erase the lines. “If I could go back and change things, I would never have been your ‘ma’,” she says quietly, letting the seatbelt snap thud into the door. “Go on upstairs and wait for me, Credence. Don’t bother the girls.”

She may as well have slapped him like she had the night he’d dropped his fork. Credence’s ears ring the same hollow void as he walks across the dark parking lot. Someone’s having a fight in front of one of the doors on the ground floor. Two women. The taller of the two, wrapped in bathing towel, yanks the shorter one’s hair. They wrestle, a dance with complicated steps. He is not a dancer, stumbles graceless over concrete space markers at the edge of the lot.

It hits him, in passing by, that he has never raised his hand to Ma and probably never will, and he’s sour on himself for that. One of the women spits. Credence ducks around them as he mounts the stairs.

By the time he reaches the second level, his entire body aches as though she has already beaten him, and he’s sour on himself for having hid the shorts so stupidly in the gap behind her bed, too. He should have thrown them away, or left them in Percival’s car. He nearly pushes past Chastity on the open walkway, where she has come to wait with gleaming eyes.

He stops instead, lets her look him up and down and tug a wrinkle from his t-shirt, reach around and tuck the tag back into the collar with a pity that curls his tongue into the roof of his mouth. Somehow, her loveless nannying is worse than her gloating.

Her hair is wet and she’s already dressed in her blue nightgown from home. It’s too long, and he knows the polyester gets hot at night without the air conditioner running, but Chastity is not like Credence and does not complain. She’s clever like that, and thinks herself better than him for it, he knows. He guesses she’s right. Ma has never made her sleep in the bathtub for opening her stupid mouth about the heat.

“You’re such a dumb fool,” she says, yanking at his collar. “Such a stupid little idiot, you are. Modesty tried to take the fall for you, you know, but Mama wouldn’t let her.”

Her cheeks splotch pink. She never says ‘mama’ anymore, not since she got her monthlies and outgrew the pinch-rhyming game and sleeping in the same room together and having anything to do with Credence at all. She’s frightened for him. Her wide-eyed fear wakes him up more than anything, and for the first time since he left the car, Credence feels the weight of maternal abandonment slide through his chest like hot sand.

“You’d better hurry up inside,” she tells him, nodding as though he had been the one to suggest it. She lays a hand firm on his shoulder and lets him fall against it for a moment. “She’ll make it worse for you if she finds you dallying out here, and - and it’s a school night for Modesty.” She releases him. Without the pressure of her spindle-hand against his him, his entire body feels cold.

The summons from Percival comes via the bid pig as soon as Credence finishes his penultimate set on Tuesday.

“Manager asked for you,” she tells him without looking up from her phone.

Credence ignores her. All day Percival has let him wait. Let him ask. Let him come himself and ask, he thinks. He sits, panting, on the floor to remove his shoes and line them up against the wall on top of his character sack. He watches her go back to her leather chair on the far side of his line of vision. Turns his back to the wall as he always does to change out of his damp grey t-shirt. Uses that to mop the sweat from his neck and face and hairline. Folds it into the sack.

Uncertainty, and the grumbling in his stomach, drive him to pick through the bin of leftovers on the table while he delays. There’s nothing good, no bacon or waffle. A lot of home fries and fried onions. He spoons them into his palm and eats them like that in the corner of the room, watching the bid pig file her nails on her chair.

She swings her legs over the armrest and sets the nail file delicately onto the table at her elbow. Searches through a canvas bag for a bottle of nail lacquer. Shakes it at him, when she notices his looking. He’s wanted to see Percival all week, and now he does not. Credence shrugs.

“You want your nails painted?” Maybe it’s a joke, but he shrugs again, wiping onion grease onto his black sweatpants. “C’mere,” she says, sliding her legs back down the front of the chair to make room. “Come pick your colour.”

She has a small, round face matched by round teeth, like milk teeth. A little snub nose that she wrinkles in concentration as she takes his hand from his lap, pressing the pad of her thumb into the space between the skin of his finger and his nail. “You bite your nails?”

“No.”

“Looks like it,” she says. “You cut them so short.”

Credence has nothing to say in return to that. Ma cuts his nails when she does his hair, and she always goes too short to make the cut last longer on both. He shifts over the edge of the table so that she can tug his hand into her lap, his stomach following. It’s oddly intimate, sitting close, their knees touching. It occurs to him that he’ll have to find some way of taking the lacquer off before he leaves work.

She wrinkles her nose again. Her hands are rough with callouses. She taps her fingers into the cup of his palm until he turns it over. “I’ll just do a clear coat,” she says. “Unless you want ballet pink.”

“Clear coat is okay.”

“Do you always do Tigger?”

“Mostly,” Credence says. He thinks of Percival upstairs in his office, who had made this possible, and bites his lip. “Do you always do Piglet?”

She’s the bid pig. They both know that she does. She looks at him for a moment and then shrugs and laughs. “I wanted to be Tinkerbell, but they measured me too short. Stuck in fur, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Credence says, “I guess.”

Their conversation goes no further than that, and they fall into silence. They’ve worked together almost every day for months now, Credence thinks, and will never become friends. He blinks against a waft of lacquer fume as she sets the bottle onto the table at his side. She pinches her lips together and paints slowly over the short nail on his thumb. The lacquer is cool going on. She’s much shorter than he is and has to fold herself over her lap to blow on each finger before moving on to the next, taps his knee for him to hold up the other hand.

The nail lacquering takes longer than he’d expected. Sometimes she chews the arch of her top lip with her tiny teeth, or glances up to catch onto a stray piece of gossip from the others passing through. Someone stops to peer down at his hands, but clear lacquer is deemed boring. They move away, disturbing the cloud of fume, a shadow over Credence’s hand that he follows across the carpeted floor to the doorway, where Percival is scrawling something into his clipboard with a dull pencil. Frowning at Credence. His thick eyebrows pushed up high on his forehead.

“I need a word with you, Mr. Barebone,” he taps his clipboard with the flat of his pencil eraser. “When you have a minute.”

Though it sets his insides squirming, Credence waits until his nails have dried. He thinks to himself that it’s a fair trade, that he has waited for Percival almost an entire week. When he stands, the bid pig draws a face, flashes him two rows of small, even teeth.

“Good luck,” she says. He wonders as he climbs the stairs, if she has any inkling why he needs it.

Percival turns the screen of the computer outward over his desk when Credence walks in, as though they are two colleagues, and he needs to hear Credence’s opinion on something important. “You took your time.” He’s in an anxious mood, trawling through the desk drawers for gum, overwound. When Credence falls into his usual seat across from him, he lays a hand palm-flat on his desk and whistles through his teeth. He touches his own face just below his eye. “Somebody got you good.”

“There was a fight downstairs.” It’s not a lie. Credence holds his closed fist up in front of the L-shaped bruise where his belt buckle had bit into his cheek in illustration of his imaginary involvement.

“Looks painful.”

He lowers his fist back into his lap. “It’s all right.”

For a while after that, Percival stares quietly into the blank screen of his computer. Something is different about him, Credence thinks, but he can’t pinpoint what it is and gives up looking. Seemingly oblivious to this, Percival hums and jiggles the computer mouse, making the system light up. “Credence - ” He runs pointer and middle finger over his lips, as though debating how to proceed, having won Credence’s attention. “There’s something that I have to tell you,” he says. “But now that you’re sitting here, I don’t want to.”

“So, don’t.”

“I’m afraid that’s not how it works.” Percival frowns at him. “Not with this.” His desk has been cleared. Credence registers the absence of the rainbow bobblehead with a small start. “I have to - I wish you would - ” Percival shakes his head. “Can you come over today? I think it’d be better if I showed you this one in person.”

Leaving early to go to Percival’s house, on a work day, is the greatest risk Credence has taken yet. He can imagine Chastity over his shoulder telling him much of the same as he phones Ma from the desk phone in Percival’s office to let her know that he has picked up a double and an offer for a ride from one of his coworkers and will not be home until late.

She doesn’t sound pleased about it, but she doesn’t tell him off, either. He thinks to himself as he drops his costume pieces into their allotted laundry bins in the tunnel that neither of those has ever counted for much, but that is the way that things stand.

In the car, they’re both quiet. The car smells freshly cleaned, too clean when Percival rolls the windows shut. All of the leather is gleaming. Credence traces his finger over the spotless vinyl of the dashboard. It comes back oily. He wants to tell Percival about Ma and the new church, but something holds his tongue still behind his teeth. He clicks them instead as Percival turns on the radio. Every station is at commercial. He wipes his finger on the knee of his pants, forcing breath through the running-cramp tightness in his chest. The sky rumbles, threatening evening storm, and they listen to an excited testimonial for Swedish-made multi-purpose futon beds - great for small spaces - until Percival turns the radio back off with a sigh.

“I’m sorry for disappearing on you so suddenly.”

Credence looks at him. The way that he sits when he drives, with the seat lowered at a leisurely recline, his broad palms on the wheel ornamented by the silver watch, one circle inlaid by three others, which Percival had showed him in the backyard. Eight thousand dollars for telling the days of the week, and the month, and the moon cycle, just for fun. There was something else about it. He blinks at it, trying to remember the other details that remain elusive. He shrugs. “It’s fine.”

“Something came up, like I said,” Percival continues, the car rocking from whipping over one lane and into the next as he floors it around a minivan. “It’s been a weird week. You look like you had one of those too.” He casts a glance slantwise at Credence’s milk-bone hand on the centre console.

“I guess.”

A droplet of rain hits the windshield. Somehow they evade the rest, speeding out from under thick clouds and into grey winter sky, down the tree-lined road through Percival’s town. The trees are blooming magnolias again, powdery white petals already browning on the sidewalk. In mourning, no doubt, for their tree-compatriot at the church. He wonders idly which part of the New Testament disregards the old mandate about cutting them down and decides it doesn’t matter.

In Percival’s town, it’s still Christmas months on, lights strung up on Victorian gables and fake snow on the lawns. They slow down to allow a family of bicyclists to overtake them at a stop sign, Percival drumming his fingers on the wheel. All of them ride matching green sports bikes and wear matching orange jackets. The littlest on training wheels, green flag whipping in the breeze. The Von Trapp family cyclists, Credence thinks, having watched bits of that movie over someone’s shoulder in the break room a week before. Percival taps the horn. They know each other; the mother waves, rocks the littlest’s helmeted head in her palm as though his body is an extension of her own appendages, forced to mirror their movements.

“Neighbours,” he explains, as they round the next corner and disappear into the vegetation. “Lived here about ten years,” he adds, though Credence had not asked. When Credence does not answer, he hums through his teeth, coasting up to the next stop sign, throwing the gear into neutral. “If it’s okay, I think we should go into the house today.”

“Okay.”

“It’s the kind of conversation that should be had in a house,” Percival says. The car crawls up his long drive. Percival’s house is the only one in the block without string lights over its dormer windows. They do not pull into the garage. He does not unclip his seatbelt when he parks. “I should have invited you in sooner.” He sighs, combing fingers through his hair. He’s had it cut recently. Credence blinks at the razor blunted line of it against the nape of his neck. “I just didn’t think you wanted to. You’ve always seemed to want your personal space.”

There is nothing to say. Credence traces over the pigskin vinyl on the dashboard with his knuckle. Plastic-cool from air conditioning. In his periphery, Percival unbuckles himself clumsily, whisper-swearing, taking the key out of the ignition. He wishes it would rain, so they had an excuse to stay inside the car. He doesn’t want to go inside the house, where Percival will have the advantage of being in his own home and Credence the disadvantage of being cut loose in somebody else’s, with nowhere else to go.

He wonders if he’ll cry. Sometimes he cries. When Ma got the side of his face with the buckle, he was so surprised he’d let out a shout, and she had taken his jaw swiftly in her hand to look. She stopped whipping him then. In the abrupt absence of her anger, he remembered what she’d said about wishing she were not his mother, had buried his face against her belly and cried, and she had let him. She’s never let him do anything like that before.

He copies Percival in opening his door and climbing out and shutting it behind him. Percival lets them in through the unlocked front door into a dark hallway. He throws on a light and busies himself taking off his shoes, motioning for Credence to do the same.

The hallway is long and painted a tasteful grey. They leave their shoes on a rack beside a porcelain umbrella stand with a crack in its rim that has been broken and glued inexpertly back together. Credence runs his finger over it in surprise at the imperfection. He wants to ask if Percival was the one who had done the gluing, but before he can, Percival mumbles something about going into the kitchen and disappears down the hall.

He can’t look at Credence, and the reason for this is apparent as soon as Credence rises.

There are three framed, black-and-white photos opposite the banister, staring out at him. Credence stares back. He hates Percival for doing it this way. The other man in the photographs is long and fair-skinned and angular and beaming, holding Percival in his arms and kissing him. Unlike Credence, he is taller than Percival by several inches, but the height difference does not make them unmatched, makes them no less happy. His eyes are not large. Most of his face is nose and bottom lip and smile. He wears a white tuxedo and so does Percival, magnolia blossoms comically large on both of their lapels, like clown flowers.

Credence looks at the shoe rack, where his scuffed church shoes sit beside a larger pair of green rain boots, mud caked across one toe. He judges those to belong to the husband. Percival’s boots and his running shoes are as carefully groomed and the same noncommittal size as the rest of him on the bottom shelf, not particularly short, nor particularly tall. All of him is broad instead, and takes up more space than he has any right to. Credence turns the hall light off before he goes.

“I wasn’t sure what you wanted to drink,” Percival says over the tray he has laid out with bottles and two glasses on a table behind his sofa. He runs his hand over them like Babs with her barcode scanner, a visual listing: Orange juice, honey liquor, milk. No whiskey. When Credence simply stares at him, he pours himself a glass of water with ice from a plastic carafe and drinks deeply.

The living room is larger than their entire motel room plus the bathroom. A colossal space, dim from the lowlight through the eastern-facing window. Credence stands in the outlet just off the hallway, unsure how to enter it or if he wants to. This is not the kind of bad he had imagined, when he’d imagined it ending. There is no Ma in this thoughtfully decorated room, and Percival is not shouting in the cast member parking lot while Credence cries or wrings his hands or smashes through the driver-side window with a bat.

In total, he thinks, this house is too nice. They will not be able to argue in here. He will not be able to raise his voice over decorative vases filled with fresh flowers, or slam his fist into a mirrored side table. He supposes he could tear through the books arranged by height on two shelves around the large television, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to. He’s never had the talent for anger that Ma has. He slides his fists into his pockets while Percival refills his glass. Everything is muted grey, even the sofa, even the cushions, like the house exists as a show model for viewing purposes only. Not the home of a Disney World entertainment manager and his handsome husband, or the site of an illicit rendezvous with a lover.

A gleaming something through the large window draws his attention. He walks towards it and stops just short of crossing in front of Percival, stood still at the back of the sofa, still holding his drink. The shades have been pulled for once. Outside, there is a bottle of wine and an ashtray on the table between the two deck chairs where Credence and Percival have sat for hours some evenings shooing off mosquitos, or chatting and kissing in the shade of the floral trees.

In a great rush, Credence feels the gravity of what is about to happen charge through him like lead. Exhausted, he drops heavily onto a fat chair. He drops his head into his hands. “What’s your husband’s name?”

“Theseus,” says Percival at once.

Another one for the odd names club. Under different circumstances, it might have made him laugh. He looks up through his splayed fingers. “Does he know my name?”

Percival sets down his water. He straightens the tray on the coffee table, clinking ice in glass. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I told him that.”

“Was he here the entire time?” His voice wobbles. He pinches the skin of his throat punishingly, willing it to behave him. “In this house, the entire time?”

“Theseus lives in Hong Kong.”

“But - ”

“He works for the Company over there, Credence. He has for the past year.” Percival seems to be able to look everywhere but at Credence. His lap, his drink, the wall.For a moment, they both stare out the window at the bottle and ashtray that had not been there when Credence was here last, then Percival says abruptly, “Thes had a conference in Orlando this week that he’d told me about, but I had forgotten.” Swirling ice. “I was going to tell him about you anyway, when you called.” He pauses for breath. His eyes make it as far as Credence’s fingers on the armrest of the chair, pinching at the grey upholstery. “It’s not, technically, cheating, because we have an ‘open relationship’.” His fingers bend quotations around the edge of his glass as he drinks. Credence watches him lick his lips, holding his glass on the edge of his knee.“Theseus’s idea when he left. I think he was worried he’d lose me if he didn’t do something drastic. But, I mean, neither of us really expected it to mean anything. Just a thought to get us through a long year, while I sold the house.”

“And then - ”

“Then you came into my office and told me you wanted me to put my dick in your mouth.” Percival’s lips curve tightly over his teeth in almost-smile. “You’ve never done anything like that before, have you? I always wondered, but I never knew how to ask you.”

“No,” Credence says. “I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“Mhm. I thought so.”

Credence watches him swirl the ice in his glass with the tip of his finger. All of Percival’s movements are smooth and deliberate, as though he’s been practising for this moment, as though he is following a choreography. Testing him, Credence coughs. Percival crosses his legs without looking up from his careful study of Credence’s hand on the armrest, Credence’s body folded into the padded back of the chair.

All that Credence can think in looking is how he was not made for this kind of theatre. In the Sunday-school Nativity, he always wanted Joseph, got palm tree. A natural talent for standing still, even Mama said so. He never moved, empty coconuts hot-glued to his hat, holding his skinny arms out green crepe paper palm leaves in brown cardboard suit, shielding plastic baby Jesus from the harsh desert sun.

He watches Percival watch his fingers on the armrest, pinches the fabric a little harder, twists it. When that fails to draw out a response, he takes a cube of ice from the empty glass on the tray and lays it on his tongue and chews. It makes his teeth and throat ache. Without looking up, Percival clears his throat. He should have planned this better, Credence thinks. His stomach hurts, and he wishes he’d stayed at work and let Ma pick him up from the parking lot after and drive him home.

Ma is predictable because he knows that she will always hurt him eventually, even if he sometimes forgets this fact about her. She is Roman legion laying waste to Masada, grounding out every last bit of him that is just-Credence until he no longer knows a part of himself that doesn’t fear her and love her in equal measure. He chews another ice cube and swallows.

“Credence.” Percival wants Herod, but he is donkey, carrying all the burden for three on his straight back. Braying apology.

Without answering, Credence swallows and takes the entire glass of ice and tips it into his cold mouth. His throat seizes protestation, full glottal airlessness, fish out of water gasping at the sudden lack of oxygen to his lungs. Percival sets his drink onto the table and stands. He looks alarmed. Credence leans forward, drooling ice into his cupped hand, his throat and chest heaving.

He jumps at Percival’s flat-palmed smack against his back where it hits bruise. He hadn’t noticed Percival crossing to him, but now there is warm thumb brushing a tear from the thin skin of his cheek, hooking under his chin and another blow to his back, dislodging the glacier from his throat.

He coughs and wipes his mouth. “Please stop hitting me.”

At this request, Percival shifts his weight onto his back foot, just slightly away. His fingertips linger over Credence’s shoulder, just touching. He rubs his jaw, distorting his face into something briefly awful, and says, “I’m sorry. You were choking.”

“Ice melts.” Credence shrugs. “I wouldn’t have died.” The hoarseness of his voice gives him away, his hands trembling in his lap. He pretends to concern himself with rubbing a smear of spit and melted ice from his pants.

“Let me get you something to drink.”

The stain will not budge, but it may dry on its own. Before Percival is too far, he abandons it, catches Percival’s hand on his shoulder, and pins it there, heart stuttering. “I want you to put your dick into my mouth,” he quotes himself, the Credence of months ago naive on his tongue. Credence of months ago had never had a dick in his mouth, and it’s a clunky line. Not an award-winner, by any means, but it stops Percival from leaving his side as he mulls it over.

“Credence - ” He sighs. “I’m moving to Hong Kong in a month. To live with my husband. It’s been planned for a year.”

“Percival - ”

Percival’s laugh is not in the original choreography, Credence knows, nor his finger-drumming over Credence’s clavicle. They will never convince an audience that this is the end, the departure. Credence watches him mouth ‘Percival’ with his own solemn inflection. His sleeve is damp from spit, too, darkens the crisp blue along the cuff.

Percival’s fingers squeeze into the soft depressions of Credence’s shoulder. “I don’t think you’ve ever called me by my name before, have you?”

“In my head, I do.”

“Seems like you do a lot of things in your head, that you don’t do out loud,” Percival says. Retracting his hand, he returns to the tray and fills half of the empty glass with honey liquor. “It wasn’t fair of me to tell you that I loved you.” He drinks deeply. “Even if I meant it.” when the glass empties, he fills it half-way again and hands it to Credence. Watches Credence drink through dark eyes slit down the length of his nose. “I did mean it,” he says, shaking his head. “And nobody calls me ‘Percival’, Credence. Not even my father.”

“I do.” The liquor burns this time going down over the rawness of Credence’s throat, but he finishes it with copycat efficiency. They are donkey and palm tree. Most likely they are minor characters in someone else’s story, he thinks, side plot with unhappy ending. Palm tree stands where palm tree grew, and donkey carts infant Jesus back to Nazareth. The old bitter disappointment of childhood.

He hands Percival the glass, catches his sleeve and hangs on to it. “What does he call you?”

Percival hesitates. “Perce, usually.”

“Perce,” Credence mimics him. He plucks at the spit stain along Percival’s sleeve. It sounds wrong. He says it again. Taps his finger over the round bone in Percival’s wrist. “He’s older than I am.”

“I’m older than you are.”

“Mhm,” Credence agrees.

They are quiet for a moment, both watching as the pattern of light shifts over the carpeted floor with the changing position of the evening sun. Percival does not object to Credence’s lips pressed flit-light over the pink skin of his knuckles. He inhales sharply. His wrist is covered in soft hair, tickles at Credence’s mouth as he promises, “I am going to leave next month. I always intended to.”

“I know.”

“But you still want to - ”

Nodding, Credence kisses his hand down to the tips of his fingers. He takes Percival’s pointer finger warm on his bottom lip and greets it with flat tongue, draws it into his mouth and sucks on it as he pulls away. Percival’s hand slides up to cup his chin and hold him in place, and he jumps before settling into it. They are knee and knee, only Percival is standing and therefore taller.

Percival’s eyes slit narrow again, dark through his lashes, wanting him. Makes Credence shiver in anticipation. Outside, the sun has gone behind a cloud, Percival’s face cast half in shadow. Credence wants to run his tongue over that side. He wants to take all of Percival inside him like this, keep this moment in the growling emptiness of his belly, broad palm under his chin.

Percival’s thumb presses down on Credence’s bottom lip, his bottom teeth, working his jaw open. He lets it. He wants to run his teeth over Percival’s knuckles but can’t reach them. He feels himself stiffen in the narrow space between his thigh and his pants, and whimpers pathetically, writhing to get to Percival’s buckle, just out of reach, without moving his head.

Percival’s eyes soften, but he doesn’t take his thumb out of Credence’s mouth or let him suck on it again. Tenderly, he licks the thumb of his other hand and presses it damp to Credence’s eyebrow, drawing a straight line over hair that had been knocked out of place. “You told me you’re going to Hell - ”

“I ahn.”

“You’re going somewhere,” Percival shakes his head, increasing the pressure of his thumb over Credence’s jaw, “but it’s not Hell. Raised religious or not. You don’t belong in Hell, Credence, so you’d better take your foot off the pedal, before you hit a brick wall.” The edge to his voice makes Credence’s pulse race, makes Percival feel exciting where before he had been depressing, father announcing impending divorce to gathered family. But the moment passes, Percival pulls his hand away, wiping Credence’s spit onto his pressed work trousers, buttoning and unbuttoning his cuff. “I’m a married man,” he says gently. “I’m not going to fuck you in my living room.”

“So, fuck me - in your bedroom.”

The shadow curves and falls off the contour of his face. Credence’s chest shudders, watching from the seat cushion of the chair beneath him as Percival smiles. Tugs him up by the shirt-collar. Kisses Credence’s wet mouth.

Credence kisses back. Percival hooks his fingers into the waistband of Credence’s suit pants. Flicks fingers from the top button so that he can undo them. His touch is rough, makes Credence want rougher. He pulls underwear and trousers down at once, pressing his toes over them so that Credence is forced to step out with his erect cock bouncing between his naked thighs and his heart strumming half-beats, to follow him up the stairs.

Hardly trusting his luck, Credence stops just off the landing. He turns to look down the hall opposite, three closed doors. The open one behind is Percival’s, the room he shares with his husband. His heart races off-rhythm, thuds against the fragile cage of muscle and skin. He jumps at the light sting of fingers on his ass, cock twitching, turning to face Percival’s sheepish apology for the swat with a grin.

“Don’t. I like it.”

“Those are spare rooms,” Percival tells him in return, rolling his eyes. “If you’d ever come inside before, I would’ve given you the tour.”

He takes Credence into the bedroom, where the blinds are drawn, thin bars of dusty gold over the striped duvet on the bed where he sits them both down, pulling Credence into his lap. He runs his hands over Credence’s thighs, outside and inside, making his shoulders contract, kisses his shoulder, nosing over a bruise that he cannot see under the unbuttoned collar of his shirt.

“I liked it - ” Credence shivers, peeling himself away, “ - when you hit my ass, I liked - ”

Before he can finish the sentence, Percival shoves him off, flips him roughly over his lap. He lays his hand in the soft, short hair at the base of Credence’s neck, stilling his trembling, the other over his ass cheeks, his legs spread to accommodate Credence’s hardness. “You like this?” His voice closer than Credence expected, makes his heart hammer in his chest, into Percival’s clothed thigh.

“Yeah.”

His breath hot and damp over Credence’s ear. “Do you want me to smack you here, Credence?” Rolling the tight skin between thumb and forefinger so that Credence jerks foreward. Percival’s hand on his neck stops him from sliding any further, squeezes lightly, signalling that his own pleasure the way that it does when Credence sucks him off in the garden outside, and he breaths out a shuddering groan into the hardness of Percival’s lap.

“Yes. Yes, I want - ” He swallows around the thick knot of his own breath in his still-sore throat. “I want that, please.”

There is no further deliberation. The first smack hits him flat on his ass, making him yelp.

“Tell me if it’s too hard.”

He shakes his head. “No, harder.” The smacking wakes something animal in Credence, claws out his belly and up through his ribs. He wants Percival to hit harder and knows he won’t. He takes Percival’s finger in his mouth again, takes two of them, down his throat and then, running his tongue along the slit between nail and skin, groans. Each blow spread heats over his skin, coursing through his belly, into his cock. He tries to rut against the lap beneath him and meets air.

They’ve never fucked like this. Of course they’re doing it at the end, when he can only have it once. All of his best things happen and then stop. They never stay with him, beginning with the woman who gave him birth. Percival’s hand hits the same spot twice, and his body jerks, out of control. The feral thing in his chest groans fury, begs around the fingers in his mouth, drools down his chin.

Then the fingers disappear. Wordless, Percival places his wet hand over Credence’s back to brace himself and leans forward, tugging open a drawer on the nightstand. The clock there flashes six-thirty-six. He opens a bottle of lube loudly, a plastic cap pop against Credence’s ear, or just over his head. He thinks that Percival did it deliberately to excite him before spreading the lube cold over the cleft between Credence’s ass cheeks. His eyelids flicker. The cap snaps shut, and Percival tosses it onto the bed.

Once he has spread lube like liquid warmth over Credence’s asshole, he turns Credence’s head back from the base of his jaw to kiss him, his mouth hot, breath choppy. “You’re so - filthy, Credence, so - good.” His voice is a high whine, makes Credence gasp into the scratchy cloth of his work pants. He rubs his fingers over the slick skin of Credence’s asshole, teasing over the rim. “You want that?”

“Perce - ”

Another smack, unexpected, sends shockwaves up Credence’s spine, his hair standing on end. He moans and tries again, “Percival - ”

“Fuck.” The first finger goes in to the knuckle and pulls back, joined by the second, spreading. “Too much?”

Credence cannot speak. His body rigid, he throws his head back, throws out a torn cry. His throat aches. He wants Percival to touch him, but Percival spreads his own legs and guides Credence’s hand onto his own mouth and tells him, leaning down, voice low and filthy, to lick it. Wraps it spit-wet over his leaking cock. “You’re so good, so hard. Want you to come for me.” He twists his fingers in Credence’s hole, pulls back and pushes in further, filling the soft inside of him until he can’t take any more, until he cries out again.

He works on himself while Percival alternates with his fingers, smacking Credence’s ass all heat and salt-sting with his free hand. His cock thrust heavy in his fist between Percival’s knees, the hardness of Percival’s erection flat against his chest, the hand on his backside warm as the one inside him.

Percival catches him before he comes onto the rug. He hoists Credence up onto his chest and watches him spill over his wrinkled button-up, running his hands up Credence’s back, yanking his shirt up over his head before Credence can stop him. He takes his own soiled shirt off and throws it in a ball over the edge of the bed, panting.

“C’mere, sweetheart - ” Lets Credence fall against him, slaps his ass a final time, deep shudders. Before they lie down, he takes Credence’s head in his hands and stares at him. “Who ever gave birth to you must have been a model,” he says, kisses him briskly, deliberately on the mouth and then his nose, cheeks, forehead, eyes until Credence shoves him away, laughing his relief and shaking still from somewhere deep in the core of his body. “I mean it,” Percival says, crooked little tug at the corner of his mouth. “It’s nuts. You’re beautiful. Weird as hell, and a menace in my car, but visually - stunning.”

“You’ll make me vain,” Credence shushes him.

“You’d have every right to be.”

“Please.”

“Lie down with me a little while, then,” Percival says, digging fingers in around Credence’s thighs, tugging him closer. “No - don’t worry about that.” He shifts his leg, knocking Credence’s hand away from his erection. “This one’s about you. I just want to hold you for a minute. I just want,” - drawing a blanket over them, rolling Credence’s back into his chest, and now that he can see, he breathes in sharply - “Credence, what the hell? What the hell is that?” Credence shuts his eyes. Opens them. “Your neighbour come at you with a crowbar, or something?” Percival asks weakly over his shoulder.

“Something,” Credence says, jerking his shoulder out from under Percival’s fingertip touch. The sweat drying off him leaves his skin cold and goose-pimpled. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Sorry. It just looks painful.”

“It is, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

The creature-thing in Credence’s chest flickers again, same raging demon spirit sent him possessed through the hymnals as a little boy, tearing out pages, banging his fists on the piano keyboard to fetch her running to him. He catches Percival’s hand around his side and squeezes it, lets Percival’s chin settle on his shoulder. Sometimes as a child he had made a theatre out of it just to draw her out to him, so that she would take his wrists in her hands and pray for him and hold him down in her lap. So that she would hold him. He pushes his head back against Percival’s neck and stops in feeling it tense at his touch. His back aches the same as it has all week, a steady throb, sting of sweat on raw skin. Credence can almost ignore it. She had been so alarmed when she got his face. She never uses the buckle. He’s sour on himself for having left the top button of his shirt so stupidly undone.

Little idiot you are, Chastity had told him. One of them has never had to sleep in the bathtub. Chastity would have found a better hiding spot for the swim shorts, and she would not have been caught, he is sure of it. If she’d found out she was fucking a married man, she would cut her losses and walk home. She would not have done it to begin with.

Percival’s fingers tap-tap up the side of his ribcage. Stop and tap again. “Credence, I - you’d tell me about it if it was something else, right?”

His voice sounds thin and fragile in the shell of Credence’s ear, little boy asking Mama for the second helping of soup, knowing she will say no and asking anyway, because he’s hungry. He’s always hungry. Credence shrugs roughly, not caring if his shoulders knock Percival’s chin a little, jostle him a little, and then his guilt drives him to answer, “So you can worry about me in Hong Kong?”

“So that I can worry about you right now in Central Florida, actually,” Percival answers drily.

“Well, I wouldn’t tell you anything,” Credence answers.

Percival laughs. “That makes me feel a lot better, thanks.” He wraps his arms around Credence’s chest and holds him carefully, his body still hot, even through his clothes. Soon he will leave, and Credence will still be here, salt pillar stood in the motel parking lot beside the flickering signage. He tells himself, the Lord said, do not look behind you. He pinches the skin between his knuckles with one hand and then lets that hand wander, smarting, until Percival takes it by the wrist from prodding exploration of his fly, making gentle murmurations. “Hey, not right now, sweetheart. It’s fine, it’s fine, Credence, we don’t have to talk.”

“Do you call him that?” He sounds whiny and young to his own ears, but he hasn’t cried yet, and that has to count for something.

“I do,” Percival admits.

“What does he call you?”

Somewhere on an adjacent property, a lawnmower hums shrilly.

Percival shrugs against him, nose in his hair. “Maybe we should call him, so you can ask him yourself.”

“He wouldn’t like that,” Credence hedges.

“Maybe. You never know.”

He lets this new information fill in the sketchy image he has of the smiling man from the wedding photos downstairs as Percival sponges kisses down the side of his jaw. Big house and magnolia blossom corsages aside, it’s difficult for Credence to dislike a man who would rather open up a relationship before losing it. Who lies down in bed beside another man who calls him sweetheart. None of of these images fit the exigent indictments of homosexual love that Ma has printed onto so many tracts and has had him press into so many unwilling hands. It doesn’t sit well with him. Uncomfortable with this incongruence, he settles at last for a begrudging, “Well, you know him, and I don’t,” that doesn’t sit well, either.

“I don’t know what he’d like right now, but I don’t think he does either,” Percival says, his voice smaller as he pulls away to rest his chin on the cowlick at the back of Credence’s head. His hand drifts over Credence’s thigh, fingernail pricks up the taut skin of his hips, resting on hip bone. He seems to be waiting for something, piling words up in his throat and swallowing them, larynx quivering into Credence’s skull. His fingernail scrapes. He rubs over the red spot, sorry, when Credence winces. “I don’t really know how to ask this,” he mutters, “but, do you hurt yourself?”

Credence shivers. “What?”

“You know.”

Unsure how to answer, he jerks his hip out from under Percival’s rubbing finger. He says, “I’m tired.”

It’s quiet. In the neighbor yard, the lawnmower has been shut off, outside gaping silence. He wishes that Percival would leave it be. The bedside clock reads seven-fifteen. Credence has hours still before Ma will expect him. His body feels spent, like he could hardly make it up the steps to their room if he tried. He wishes acutely that Percival had never told him about the husband or brought him inside and that he could have had these last days of togetherness in ignorance. Feeling unkind, he shares this thought with Percival, who says nothing, just tugs their bodies close beneath the sheet, humming.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is immense, and the story is finally finished. The usual warnings apply. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> This is a video trailer I made for the fic lol. 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIHXKQNl2Y4

The sun is just coming up over the horizon line of Percival’s town across the highway when Modesty asks him to walk her. It’s magic hour, all of sunrise a golden dew on the spare highway grass that disappears as soon as they step over it, crossing the scab of grass separating the highway from the motel parking lot, where the school bus will make its stop. He’s walking her as a concession of defeat to the favoured one; Ma had given him a hard-eyed look when he wavered, still blinking sleep from his eyes in the bathroom doorway. That look had followed them out the door, even after Credence was dressed and clearly going.

Modesty, having noticed, is holding his hand in hers, her small fingers laced up in his. They fit uncomfortably; she squeezes too hard sometimes in her excitement to show him her favourite hot air balloons crossing the morning sky overhead, her small face red-cheeked from morning chill, pointing out the one with the checkers, the blue and red stripes, the stars.

“I love the balloons the most, because Ma never lets us watch the fireworks. But the fireworks are from Disney World. Did you know that?” She skips over the grass, lands heavily and straightens, yanking him after, oblivious to his shrug. “Do you ever see fireworks at Disney World, Credence?”

“No,” Credence tells her. “I work in a restaurant, remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” Modesty says, “I remember that. Do you ever see Mickey Mouse?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you talk to him?”

“No,” Credence says. “Not really, no.”

“Well, I really love the bright balloons the most,” Modesty says, “because they look like Joseph’s coat. Why do you think his brothers sold him to those men?”

“Because he was annoying,” Credence says, stopping to scratch at his nose. “Every morning before work, he’d talk their ears off about his dreams. And they all knew their father loved him best.”

Sensing him lagging behind, she gives a tug to his sleeve, flicks her finger over her eyebrow, rolls her eyes.

He takes her hand again and smiles. “The bus is coming soon.”

“I know,” she says, “You’re the one walking slow.” She glances at him sideways, testing. She says, “I have to tell you a secret.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” he promises.

“Okay.” She bites her lip. “A boy in my class at school does not even believe in God, Credence. He does not believe that Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, died for our sins on the cross, and he’s not even good at math, _honestly_. But sometimes he’s funny, but I told him he’ll probably go to Hell either way.”

“Probably,” Credence agrees, letting her swing his hand in hers.

“So, but he said, if God doesn’t exist, that Hell doesn’t exist,” Modesty explains. “And _I_ told _him_ what Ma says, that nothing in the Bible has ever been _disproven_ _.”_ Again, she looks to Credence to signal his agreement that she did well. “And I told him he’s still going to Hell, and then he told my teacher, and she said she wants to have a word with my mother.”

“Is she going to?”

“I told her Mama works all day on a construction site, but she could talk to Chastity, but she just said don’t do it again, and I had to sit for five minutes during recess and say sorry.”

“That’s not too bad,” Credence says.

“I’m not really sorry, though.”

On the highway, a cement truck roars past, mixing drum turning like a spindle drawing fresh thread off the morning air. He pauses to watch it drive under the overpass, aware of Modesty as a blur at his side, unburdened again and back to staring up at the balloons, narrating their colours.

The balloons do not belong here, over grey highway and crabgrass, some low enough that they can hear the roar of the fire from the burner pumping great lungfuls of hot air into the throat of the balloon, holding it suspended above them as from an invisible string stretched down from the heavens. They are a blight on the landscape, these things of beauty. They belong over meadows and canyons and wildflowers and crowded theme parks, skim contrarily over traffic instead, coasting the sky like a flock of tropical angels, wealthy and wingless.

“I wish I could fly in one of those,” Modesty tells him as they are finally standing on the curb, waiting for the bus to arrive. Peering up at the sky visored by a freckled hand, “I wish I could fly in one of those to school. I would take you with me, too.”

“I’m too old for school.”

“We would fly right over the motel,” she says, glossing over him as though he hadn’t spoken, “I bet it looks prettier from up than it does from down.”

“It looks like a motel,” Credence tells her, not quite believing his own words. “From up and from down, it would look the exact same.”

Then the bus slides in too close to the curb, groaning, yellow. Modesty had confessed to him in whisper that it smells like sweat and old plastic and because of this, she sits in the back by an open window. This is not difficult for Credence to believe, standing there, awash in choked highway fume and bus exhaust as he watches her jog up the little staircase past the driver.

Everything in the whole world as he has ever known it has been touched by so many other hands before his, wearing so many other smells, looks worn. Smells used. He wonders if Percival has ever been up in a hot air balloon. Maybe he’s flown over his own house in one, holding his husband’s hand, taking pictures and nudging each other, see, look - home, we live there. He thinks that he can imagine them like that, two wealthy tropical angels, beautiful in the way that all rich people seem to wear beauty like a perfume over their glowing, healthy bodies, flying wingless over the world because it already belongs to them. Maybe for their honeymoon.

For a moment, he loses sight of Modesty, searches the length of the bus for her tight, yellow braids. She finds him before he finds her, waves through the window, mouthing his name. He follows her with his eyes to her seat. He watches her face press flat into the glass, her hand pressing the orange keychain into the window beneath her chin as though it too is waving goodbye to him as the bus pulls back onto the highway, having swallowed her whole.

Ma is already waiting in the car as Credence picks his way back through the parking lot. She has the windows rolled down; it’s veering hot again, each day a season of its own, independent of dates on a calendar. Her hand hovers a white smudge over the wheel when she spots him coming, but she does not honk. He jogs up to the door anyway.

She stares at him narrow-eyed through the driver-side window, taking in his scuff-toe church shoes, which have begun to pinch, even though he should be long finished growing. He watches her warped reflection size him up in the wing mirror, his pants crumpled from sleeping in them, the white t-shirt she had brought home in summer in a plastic bag bearing thrift store tags, after he’d got sun sick while tracting in the Target parking lot.

As often as he bleaches it, the shirt came with faint yellow stains over its armpits and has only mottled more since. Something - maybe that - dissatisfies her. Her lips thin.

“You are slovenly,” she tells him. “I’ve never raised you to look like that.” She watches his hand retract from the door handle. Her fingers tighten around the wheel like it is a snake, the car her garden. Knuckles yellowing. She strangles it. “Get in the car,” she says. To Credence’s surprise, she takes him shopping.

“This is new,” Percival remarks later in the living room, with a little pluck at the short sleeve of his white cotton button-up. “I like it.”

“I look like a Mormon,” Credence says, and Percival laughs over his drink, “The only Mormon I’d open my door for.”

He pretends to be busy straightening the sofa cushions to hide his study of Percival’s throat rippling as he drinks, the tip of his tongue poking out between his two lips like a piece of rose quartz growing out from the dark, wet stuff of the rest of his mouth

“Do you believe in God?” Credence asks.

Outside, the sun is on the opposite end of the house, having abandoned the yard to burnt evening light and blue shade. They are both staring into the empty yard through the window as through a screen, as though something is going to happen. Something they both expect but cannot name, as though a wind might pick up in the cluster of larkspur along the white fence, and then - whatever happens in stories, Credence thinks, when wind picks up, and the plot changes.

Percival lays his hand on Credence’s shoulder. He finishes his drink.

“I’ll get a start on dinner.”

Without waiting for an answer, he walks into the kitchen. His smile is a shadow fixed to his lips. He taps the side of the arch into the hallway as he passes through it.

“No, I mean it,” Credence calls after him, “do you believe in God?”

That night, he sits with Modesty on the balcony, reading about photons in a book she’d checked out from the school library.

Photons: a type of elementary particle, are massless and travel in waves, like sound. Unlike sound, they are also particulate, they are made up of many tiny pieces of energy, weighing even less than dust. In a vacuum, they will always move at the speed of light. And, most importantly, photons can be destroyed, which means that once Percival is gone, there will be a delay so minute that only God will have perceived it as Credence’s eyes absorb the photons that Percival’s body has reflected in lamplight onto his retinas, and another before his brain processes what he has seen as warmth and colour and shape, and by then the Percival that he knows now as a smiling and solid body will exist in another sphere of time, as far away from him as Christ.

In the morning, Credence bathes for work. He steps into the motel shower cold, a habit from home, when the water bill mattered, that is still practical in Florida heat. On the plastic toilet seat he has folded his new white shirt, his new black pants, his belt, his underwear, one of five new pairs, and his socks, one of six. He lets the water run down his chest until he goose-pimples and his nipples, like the largest of the goose-pimples, become two hard, purple nubs on his shivering chest.

His old clothes await removal in the bathroom trashcan beside the shower. Frowning at them, he takes the soap from the shower ledge. His chest aches in a deep way from the cold, like stepping off a sand bar into the sea in late spring, which he had only done once, when he was baptised.

Outside the bathroom door, Modesty is singing, her feet a rhythmic thumping against the tile floor, playing her hopscotch game with the old rhymes he and Chastity had learned as kids when they’d go tracting by the playground behind PS. 2. _My_ _momma_ _,_ _your_ _momma_ _hanging_ _out_ _clothes_ _._ _My_ _momma_ _socked_ _your_ _momma_ _in_ _the_ _nose_ _,_ _did_ _it_ _hurt_ _-_ _no_ _!_ _Did_ _it_ _hurt_ _-_

Beyond: the leaden thud of the front door falling into its hinge, and shushing, the room left in silence. He catches his reflection above the sink and stops. His chest and his back are still bruised purple from the belt, and will be for another week at least. Watching in the mirror as he does so, Credence rubs soap onto his hands from the pale pink bar and washes all over himself carefully, with the tips of his fingers.

Losing control with the buckle had frightened Ma, but not for long. A few days, a dropped pitcher, and he’d been sent from the bathroom with belt-stung hands and his ears ringing _Religion_ _is_ _a_ _Fortune_ , which Modesty was singing notes to in her clear, loud voice over the sound of whipping, hopscotch thunk, slap shoe sole on tile, and him sliding his belt back through the loops of his pants as he got himself ready for work.

In his living room, or over the striped Ralph Lauren sheets on his bed, Percival never asks. Not since that evening, with his awkward, do you hurt yourself, Credence? You’re so slight, Percival says sometimes instead. Taps the hardness of Credence’s hip bone where the skin is like smooth paper, watching him shiver. Can I buy you lunch?

There is nothing that Credence can say, anyway. He lets Percival lick peanut butter from the corner of his mouth, slide wet tongue up his jaw, in the tender hollow space behind his ear. After, he thinks of the husband in Hong Kong and shivers again and wipes Percival’s spit from his earlobe. He cannot say anything. The words creep lightfoot up the back of his throat and do not make it over the hurdle of his lips before they are dragged down again, like he had imagined as a little boy, skeleton monster hands reaching out for his ankles from the deep to pull him under the bed.

At work they are professional, until they are not. They take risks not locking the office door. Percival says, This is so stupid of me. If I lose my job here, I’m sunk. But he tugs Credence by the shirt collar into his office anyway so that they can kiss, letting Credence touch him anywhere, open his clothes and fuck him. There are rules to these encounters that they do not discuss. Their kissing is worried. They cannot make a lot of noise. The husband in Hong Kong hangs over all like Ma’s cross, mounted now to the wall above the chancel and burning eternal golden flame, sanguine flame. There are a lot of things that they do not discuss.

For example, Percival no longer says, I love you, but now he says, I meant it, and Credence can infer the same meaning from the two. Semantically, they are almost indistinguishable, different sets of sounds and syllables for the same feeling. He runs them through his head, convocated into the same long, wailing harp song. _I_ _-_ _lo_ _-_ _ve_ _-_ _you_ _-_ _imeant_ _-_ _it_ _-_ _ilove_ _-_ _you_ _-_ _I_ _-_ _meant_ _-_ _it_ _._ _Fa_ _-_ _la_ _-_ _sol_ _-_ _sol_ _-_ _sol_ _-_ _sol_ _-_ _fa_ _-_ _la_ _-_ _sol_ _-_ _la_ _-_ _sol_ _-_ _sol_ _-_ _la_ _-_ _fa_ _,_ the mixed-pitch joy of many voices as it had been throughout his childhood in their church at home, for all of their singings, _for_ _when_ _we_ _all_ _get_ _to_ _Heaven_ _we_ _will_ _shout_ _aloud_ _and_ _sing_ _,_ _shout_ _glory_ _,_ _Halle_ _-_ _hallelujah_ _-_

Credence tells Percival, I will never say it. Percival does not deserve to hear him say it. Percival will leave and take the words with him, absorbed and obliterated like photons by the solidity of his departing body. They slip out anyway in an afternoon over the hard top of Percival’s desk, into Percival’s trembling naked back beneath his bunched shirt. Credence pulls his mouth away and licks the salt from his lips.

Love, tasting now of grief, is finally something that he can bear.

Sometimes the gators will come up out of the decorative ponds in Percival’s town, where Percival takes him walking when they have nothing better to do and do not want to be in the house. Their noses emerge from the water like clumps of silt, parting the water around them into small channels as they breathe. Percival has told him stories of gators crawling through the grass on his jogs, their long, prickly bodies gliding on squat legs over the sidewalk. They make no noise when they run. In this way, they are even more lethal, despite their small size. Credence eyes them nervously. They are less interested in him and do not show any more of themselves but their steepled nostrils, the occasional yawning jaw.

Once, Percival tells him, years ago when he first moved here (unspoken: with Theseus), he had come down this path for a jog and tossed half of a power bar into the pond, and one of the gators had come out after him, probably in the hopes of more. It was only a baby one, but fast. Chased him back out into the street. At that, he’d run for his car, driven off, and called animal control, who laughed at him.

“There’s nothing like that in California,” he says, shaking his head.

“Do you have any power bars on you now?” Credence suggests, edging closer to the water.

He lets out a shriek as Percival’s arms close around him, clamping his to his side, and Percival rocks them both from one foot onto the other, his chin on Credence’s shoulder, laughing. “You are your own worst enemy,” he says. “I’m protecting you from yourself.”

“Scared me to death first.”

“Thought you were about to become gator lunch, did you?” Percival’s hand slides up his chest. He holds his palm flat over the trembling spot where Credence’s heart is racing like a small, feathery bird flapping beneath his ribcage. “Still alive,” he pronounces, and then without warning he hoists Credence into the air and holds him there. Shakes them both a little in the direction of the water. “Hm. You’re a little heavier than I thought you would be,” he grunts, and laughs again, letting Credence fall back onto his feet with a wet kiss to the side of his head.

Having seen what they came to see, they decide to walk back to the car. It’s sticky out, and the mosquitos love Credence. Percival kills one on his arm by the passenger door, smacked flat with the heel of his hand, leaving a red stripe where he kisses after in apology before starting the car, and winks, “You have sweet skin or blood, or whatever. You should eat more garlic.”

The weeks creep up on them. On the first floor one morning there is a big to-do. A birthday barbecue to which several neighbours have been invited, not including them. They hadn’t expected invitations, but the barbecue smoke crowding in through the open window is salt on a wound that Modesty knows better than to complain about. She also knows better than to watch from the balcony the downstairs kids wild chasing through the parking lot but does it anyway, while Ma is at the grocery store. “They’re having ice cream,” she informs him later in undertone, “and playing freeze dance. Whoever dances after the music stops, loses.’

“Go to bed,” Chastity tells her, when she overhears this. “Go on, before Mother comes home and gives you more to cry about than ice cream.”

The weeks charge on, one and then two. Now that he knows it will end soon, Credence feels a part of himself open like fresh hatching, a snake in his belly slithering up his left arm and wide-jaw through the palm of his hand. Thou shalt not covet another man’s - Exodus 20:17. He flips through his dog-eared Bible before he goes to sleep more nights than not, always coming back to that one, underlined now in pencil. To Tina, in the purple motel, he shrugs and says, I won’t call him today. But he does. Colossians 3:14, he thinks, clothe yourself in love. “Love doesn’t have a secret husband in Hong Kong,” Tina argues. “And love shouldn’t hurt like that, Credence, but sure, what do I know? I just work in a motel.”

This hurt is not the worst that Credence has ever had. In this way, he thinks, he has been blessed with a thorough education. Something to put on his next job application, maybe: Experienced in misery, takes direction well. Love is not the mortal wound he’d expected before he could bring himself to pronounce those words. Just the salted one, the one he reopens, the snake sliding up his throat and from his mouth into Percival’s mouth before returning in a smooth ouroboros to lie in the pit of his stomach. Each time, he thinks that Percival will feel it passing between them and pull away, but he does not.

“What will you do, when I’m gone?” he asks on the phone, Credence scratching his fingernail into the plastic countertop in the purple motel while Tina smokes outside. “I mean, even if I wasn’t going,” Percival says, “what would you have done, with your life?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably become a movie star. Or an alligator wrestler.”

“Oh geez,” Percival says. “He’s in a wisecracking mood today, ladies and gentlemen, watch out.”

“Well, unless you know of anything better, that doesn’t need a high school diploma,” Credence says, and then he laughs.

“What I do know is, you’ve got too much going for you, to be so cynical,” Percival says. “You’re smart enough. You should get your GED, go to college, find something to get into that’s not a Winnie the Pooh character in a restaurant.”

“I got into you,” Credence says, twisting the phone cord around his finger as he smiles into the receiver, “and look how that turned out, really.”

“Funny. There were no complaints about getting into me last night, that I can remember.”

A family of guests bursts through the lobby then in an assault of colour. All elderly, in matching green ‘Reunion 2009’ t-shirts, talking about how much they enjoyed the buffet.They nod at him as they pass. He waits until they have exited into the parking lot, around a smoking Tina, to clear his throat.

“I have to go soon.” On the other side of the window, Tina waves her pack of cigarettes and a chocolate bar, taps her wrist. “For the record, though, I like being into you. And in you,” Credence says.

Percival does not respond for a moment, and then he sighs, a broken static sound against the receiver, “Just promise me you won’t ruin your life over it. You’re too young, and you’re good-looking. People will be falling over themselves to get to know you. Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘the world is your oyster’?”

“I’m allergic,” Credence says. “I’m allergic to oysters.”

“Okay, smartass. The point stands that you have a whole life ahead of you. I know I’m the last person to give you advice, but I mean it, all jokes aside. Are you taking this down?”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“How allergic are we talking, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Credence says. He thinks about it and shrugs. “Normal allergic, I guess.”

“There are different levels of allergic,” Percival says. “Like are we talking, pop a Benadryl for some hives allergic? Upset stomach? Epi pen, death?”

“Take me out for seafood tomorrow,” Credence says, “and find out for yourself.” Outside, Tina lights another cigarette from the tip of the one she had just smoked. She brandishes the pack again when she catches his eye through the window. He says, “I’m hanging up on you now,” and hangs up, still smiling. She gives him the cigarette she had just lit for herself and lights a new one of her own when he comes out, rubbing his hands together.

“I hope you told him to get lost,” she says. “You can’t let people walk all over you like that, you know, especially not men.”

“Actually, I’m going to see him tomorrow,” Credence informs her around a mouthful of smoke. “Tomorrow and every day until he leaves.” He taps the ash from the tip of his cigarette and plugs his fingers into his mouth to lick the tobacco smell off of them. Then he wipes his hand on his pocket and adds, “And then I’m going to call him in Hong Kong all the time, while his husband’s asleep.”

“Oh, boy, you really are a case,” Tina says. “You’d be better off calling a hotline.”

“I’ve never loved anyone like this, Tina. I feel like I could drop dead,” Credence says. “I called a Christian hotline once, though, for something else.”

“Do tell,” Tina says. “What for?”

He turns his head to breathe smoke away from them both, turns his wrist over, thinks about Ma. “Just stuff,” he says. “They told me to pray on it.” He laughs.

Tina does not laugh. “I called 9-1-1 that day when I asked if you had a dog,” she says, looking away from his surprise like it’s something indecent. “I knew it wasn’t a dog before I asked, but I didn’t know how to tell you, because I gave the motel address, and they never showed up.” She reaches for his arm where he’s frozen over his cigarette, falls short. Checks her watch. She sighs, “Damn. Anyway, your time’s almost up. I’ll give you some gum when you finish that. To hide the smell.”

Percival did not grow up in a crude approximation of a baptist church when the city was still bad, but in a large stone house with leaded windows and an olympic-sized swimming pool in Arcadia, California. He drove his own Mustang to school while his father drove to Anaheim, an ‘imagineer’. The Disney World job was his birthright, passed down from father-to-son.

He tells Credence about this over two glasses of iced tea and a plate of biscuits at a rickety table in Cracker Barrel. They shove a game of peg solitaire back and forth for a while, which he takes over fully so that Credence can eat all of the biscuits slathered in butter. Of the two of them, Percival’s strategy is better. No matter how the game begins, he always ends up with a single peg on the board while Credence cannot manage to come out with less than three.

Reducing himself to the position of park manager, Percival says, rather than working in corporate or for a studio, is his rebellion against his parent’s messianic expectations on their elder sons. Of a third brother, he adds over the slurp of Credence’s iced tea, the snake tongue flickering in the black of his eyes: Nobody talks about Sander.

When they kiss against the passenger door in the parking lot, Credence takes the snake writhing into his mouth, down the back of his throat, feels it coil up in his belly, satisfied. It takes a minute for the air conditioner to bring the temperature down in the car. They sit with the windows cracked and the engine on until they hit the light, Percival holding his hand over the gear stick. They’re both hot. Everything looks tinted yellow under the bright noon sun, like someone has placed one of those plastic projector sheets over it that Ma used to write Psalms over in Sunday School. It give the entire highway a faintly unreal quality, as though they’d driven, unknowingly, onto a movie set, and a director somewhere just out of view is about to call it a wrap.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Percival says.

“I don’t think I can take talking about anything else,” Credence says, “when you start like that.” He feels Percival’s eyes on him like an itch over his forehead and blinks them away.

“It’s not like that,” Percival says. “Better than that, I hope.” But he shuts his mouth then and doesn’t say anything else until goodbye later, in the motel parking lot.

He is beginning to think the snake has always been there under his tongue.

At night, Credence lies awake on his makeshift floor bed, digging back in the untouched shelves of his memory through damning religious tract and text, the only literature of his childhood beyond the Bible. He gets up in the morning before anyone else to wash his face in the bathroom sink. He never stops to look at himself anymore; his face in the mirror is the chalky face of a stranger staring down the length of its nose at him, dark-eyed, its jaw incised in abrupt lines from the smooth wax of its head, as though he has woken up an apprentice copy of his original form. He thinks to himself, a golem. He dresses. He gets to the restaurant early, with enough time to kiss Percival over the desk before his first walk onto set.

The snake has fashioned a golem out of him in his sleep. Maybe his is the last mother left on Earth who taught her children to fear and distrust creatures like this as though they are real, he thinks. He asks himself, are you still real? The snake-golem watches him cautiously in the entertainment mirror as he yanks a grey t-shirt over its head, his eyes like two empty cups in its bloodless face. He imagines someone else’s hand pouring honey liquor into them, kisses Percival with open eyes and mouth, pressed into the wall beneath framed diplomas in his office. Percival kisses and stares back.

From The Holiness of God, by R.C. Sproul, on the second shelf in Ma’s study at home:

Loving a Holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy God, an idol made by our own hands.

It is, somehow, still February, and cold again, as though the winter, in realising that its time will soon be up, has decided to give everything that it has in one go, freezing oranges onto trees like glass beads, a nightmare to farmers and to the motel manager, who comes from orange grove people. A relief to the tourists, who can finally wear the kind of clothing they associate with a warm, late winter, and a disturbance to the inhabits of the motel, used to smoking and playing music and dominoes in the parking lot at night, now driven into their rooms, which seem suddenly small. 

A week after they have hung the cross, Credence picks the locks to the church doors with two hairpins taken from a case on the bathroom sink, shrugging at Percival’s smirk, “My mother doesn’t believe in spare keys.”

“Doesn’t believe in them, as in, that they exist?”

“In that I would lose one,” he says, blinks against the darkness, pointing to the spot where he wants them to go, onto the raised dais which supports the pulpit. “I probably would,” he adds.

In one short week, the church is unrecognisable again, the walls erect and washed clean white, the roof mounted into a severe peak supported by many overlapping rafters over the sanctuary. Olive wood from Israel, Ma said, because the loan came through in full at last. Imagining these desert forests, Credence holds his hand out. He lets the pew backs collide with the meat of his fingers as he walks past them.

Sometimes people would stumble into the church at home by mistake, thinking it was something else, wanting to take a picture. It was ancient, an investment Ma had made back in the eighties when land was cheap, because no one had wanted it. The church was too old to demolish, and the building itself was lopsided and creaked, threatening a collapse it never managed to complete before they left it.

Sometimes the interlopers stayed for lunch, sheepish and eager, if Ma invited them. They were always fascinated, asking too many questions for Credence to keep up with as he laid out the after-service coffee things on the long card table near the door. To these people, their plaster and clapboard church was an anachronism, something time had spit up maybe because it had been too difficult to digest. To Percival, he can see now, footsteps echoing off the newly-laid floorboards, it is no different, even if the setting has changed.

“Why the flames on the cross?” He runs his hands over the smooth, rounded corner of the pulpit box and then over Credence’s round shoulder when Credence doesn’t answer. “Are you Methodist?”

“Baptist,” Credence tells him. “But our own kind. Southern Baptists wouldn’t ordain Ma as a woman, and she wouldn’t give up the piano outright for a Primitive service.” Smiling at this thought, he reaches up to catch Percival’s hand on his upper arm and clasp it there. His hands are warm. The church, too, is warm, despite the damp night air outside. Like a body, Credence thinks, the church absorbs light, absorbs heat, holding it in wait.

“Oof,” Percival says, breaking through his train of thought, “That’s a tough one.”

“Usually I like it,” he shrugs. “I like the singing. I like reading the Bible.”

“You sing?”

“Sometimes,” Credence says. He pushes his palms abruptly into Percival’s chest and drags them both down onto the unglazed floorboards beneath the cross and presses his hips into Percival’s hips. The sound of their rustling seems to echo throughout the dark of the sanctuary, louder in the absence of daylight, or office lamp. He asks over it, “Do you sing?”

“No, I do not,” Percival says. His throat makes a funny whine under Credence’s mouth, a crying that comes out in his voice when he adds, “I don’t read the Bible, either, and I grew up very vaguely Presbyterian, for the record.”

“Well, luckily, I didn’t bring you here to missionize you.”

The rolling of Percival’s laughter almost dislodges Credence from his perch. He clamps his thighs down around Percival’s thighs, breathes in close, feeling the curve of his lips spreading over his teeth into another smile. In the book from Modesty’s school library, he read: energy never dies, just changes container. I am that I am. Absorbed from sound and light as heat. Into bodies as heat. His energy into Percival’s. The snake rises up the back of his throat to watch through his parted lips as he kisses Percival’s neck behind his ear.

Around them, the church is underwater dark. A flume, he imagines, which their bodies will pass through en route for the morning sky. They will wake up hot air balloons over the Kissimmee strip, he thinks, immaculate, scorched from the inside. He shares this with Percival, but he can tell that Percival does not understand, because he laughs again, mouths ‘weirdo’ against Credence’s ear and then licks the same spot.

At that, for some reason, Credence thinks of his baptism on a windy morning off the scraggly tip of the Rockaways. How he and Chastity and Ma had taken a bus to get there beside a crowd of belly-round old Russian women, how they walked into the water until the waves licked their chests, Credence in a white suit, his face wet, his head shaved. He was sixteen.

His fingers pressed into the ductile flesh of Percival’s upper arm glow blue-green, like a sea anemone. He grazes the tip of Percival’s nose with his teeth. He undresses them both slowly. There is no finesse to any of it, no artful draping of discarded clothing over the pulpit; it is not a movie. They strip like undressing a doll, uneasily, knowing that what comes off will have to go back on before they leave. Naked, they kiss in a pile of shirt and sock, kiss roughly, sometimes teeth. Sometimes awkward too, knocking chins.

“The flames are just for burning,” Credence says belatedly, having thought about it and decided that it was not important. He leans his forehead into Percival’s heaving chest, tasting the salt of him. Feels the snake slip down his arm like cold sweat, take Percival’s hip in its jaw. They fuck then, in the faint blue airglow of the sanctuary, dress in silence, and drive home.

“Come to Hong Kong with me,” Percival says the next day over a formica tabletop in the cast cafeteria, where he has boldly offered to treat them both to lunch. “No, I’m serious,” he says, flicks his plastic spoon at Credence’s knuckle when he shakes his head. “I’m really serious, Credence. I wanted to talk to you about it before. With your height, you could get a job at the park out there easy. Make good money.”

“What, and be your mistress while your wife is at work?”

“My wife is pretty open-minded,” Percival says mildly. “And he’s flying in again next week. If you wanted to meet him.”

Snakes, having no ability to chew, will unhinge their jaws to consume large prey. Apples, Credence thinks, being only fruit, might not have been worth the effort. Maybe the snake lie in the grass by Eve as she ate, with its unhinged mouth gaping in wait of the fatherly voice from the far side of the garden, which it knew would come and she did not. Maybe its pleasure was in her downfall, or maybe the snake was tired of being ignored and wanted the punishment, even if it could only be had by proxy. Maybe the entire game was envy, envy of her back molars, of her design. That she could bite off only what she needed to chew, and swallow, and then bite more.

Does he want to meet Theseus? The answer is both yes and no. He wants to eat Theseus, he thinks. And to be him, also. If he cannot get either, Credence thinks of apples and exile; he looks up Florida divorce statutes on the scheduling computers in the entertainment den and prints them when no one is looking, the snake head a bulbous onion on the back of his tongue, nodding encouragement. If Ma finds them in his pants pocket, he thinks, he will tell her the truth. That he is fucking a married man. That he is in love. That it is nothing like she ever prepared him for, in all her most burning predictions, that it is so much worse.

Buoyed by this plan, he makes his way back to the restaurant for his next walk time. He does sixteen rounds of the restaurant floor, counting them. The restaurant is overcrowded, as usual. Mothers with cameras catch him on the arm as he tries to squeeze past. Their children yank his tail and then cry for more ice cream. The papers he’d printed rustle like a captured beetle in his shorts’ pocket beneath the costume fur. When he stops at a table, he imagines them crawling out over his costumed arm, a hard and shiny paper shell scuttling over the white tablecloth, flattened by the heel of his hand.

Pet snakes that do not eat rodents might eat: grasshoppers, caterpillars, termites, slugs, or beetle grubs. Bending to take a photo with someone’s child, he feels the paper beetle squirm against his leg, mirrored by the writhing in his own stomach. That’s nerves, he tells himself. Just nerves. In support of this argument, he has to run to the bathroom to throw up as soon as he skids in off the restaurant floor.

“You look pale,” Percival says with managerial concern from behind his computer screen, where he is laying twenty-dollar bills into a neat stack. “You feel okay? Drink some Gatorade.” He reaches the amount he’s been counting out silently in his head and folds the cash into an envelope, which he passes to Credence over the table. “Get your stuff back to costuming and clock out,” he says. “Meet you at the car. And take a Gatorade with you, Credence. You look like you’re about to keel over.”

It occurs to Credence, as they are driving back to the house, that Percival might be drawing the money he pays to cover Credence’s missed shifts from a joint marital account. That should be the first warning that nothing will go as he expects. He folds and re-folds the papers in his pocket.

“Are you hungry?” Percival asks, tensing his hand over the wheel at an intersection, as though he is preparing to veer hard left into a drive-thru at Credence’s say-so.

“No.”

“Is everything okay?”

They make the turn for the town instead. Credence watches Percival drive in the concave reflection of the window, watches the sky burn pink and then purple around him, and an explosion of magnolias along the road, two stop signs which they blast through after a concessionary tap on the brakes. Celebration, Florida. Relentless party, Percival had told him the first day with a smirk, unending joy, this town. A real gift to mankind, complete with walkable Main Street, Starbucks, and its own community internet gossip forum called the Front Porch.

He watches Percival’s wristwatch glint off the window, too, remembering then what Percival had told him that evening, the first evening, in the backyard, that the watch had been a gift from someone special and is matched to another piece of jewellery. Warning number two, Credence thinks. He shifts his body over the seat so that he can watch Percival’s face without the intermediary of the window.

“Does your husband wear a ring?”

“Yes,” Percival says. His fingers twitch over the wheel. “I got the watch, and Thes got the ring.”

Satisfied, Credence returns to the window. Rolls it down, sticks his hand out into the rough stream of air beside the car, which hurts going over his palm and wrist. It’s not a good hurt. He sucks a breath in sharply.

“We should probably talk,” Percival sighs. Credence is aware of eyes on his outside hand like a string tied to his wrist. “Neither of us is the best at talking,” Percival says, “I get it. But, this probably isn’t the kind of thing you should just jump into without at least discussing - discussing the basics, first.”

He tugs the wrist-string, watching Percival’s gaze follow. “Okay.”

“First of all,” Percival says, turning back to the road, “I don’t want you to feel pressured into anything you don’t like or don’t want to do. And if you _do_ feel pressured into anything, I’d appreciate it if you told me.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, good. So, right, that’s the main thing squared. Is there anything you want to talk about now, before we go inside?”

“No,” Credence says.

“Nothing?”

“Nope.”

“Let me just run through this one with you one more time,” Percival says, glancing at him over the wheel. “As your manager, I’m kind of required to check in. Because I’m pretty sure, before we left, that you had to run off your set early to throw up in the lady’s restroom.”

“I guess I did,” Credence says. For whatever reason, he finds, he cannot stop blinking. “But it wasn’t about anything,” he adds, rolling up the window and rubbing his eye, and then slipping his fist, closed, back into his lap. “I just felt sick.”

“You ‘just felt sick’, on the day we planned for you to meet my husband,” Percival says. “That doesn’t sound suspiciously like it’s about anything to you?”

“Not really.”

“Oh my god, I give up.” His hand leaves the wheel, a little jolt of the car, to nudge Credence’s shoulder. Misses, as Credence twitches out of grasp, gets his hair instead. “You’ll have to talk about your feelings one of these days,” he says, his mouth a red smile. His palm hovers, a heavy, rough thing, for a moment over Credence’s forehead, before returning to the wheel. “And there’s no need,” he says, gesturing as he slides the key out of the ignition, “to be so nervous. There’s no need. Not with me, and not with him.”

Then, Theseus.

His angular face is already pulled into a smile as he greets them at the door, so tall that Credence has to look up to say hello. He looks like a young cowboy, a long nose and a forehead that tapers into a widow’s peak where his curly hair is darkest, eyes the brackish grey-blue of the East River in late spring. He looks young, simply, boy where Percival is man, although they must both be of similar ages, some vague and unspecified cipher between thirty and thirty-six. He lays a hand on Credence’s shoulder to look at him, and when his hand pulls back, he takes the snake with it, and all of the scaliness inside of Credence is gone, like shedding one skin for the softer one underneath.

Credence feels the paper beetle shrivel up in his pocket, divorce in its belly. Later, he will go into the bathroom, retch, tear the papers into pieces too small for the human eye to read from, and flush everything down the toilet. For now, he stares at Theseus, dressed casually in jeans and a sweater, striped socks, kissing Percival on the cheek as he slides out of his shoes and sets them on the rack beside the green rainboots.

He turns to smile at Credence again, pronouncing himself “shattered”, and it is like a hole has blown open in the pit of Credence’s stomach, sprays of glass and a flooding feeling where the water rushes in. His hand opens and closes around Theseus’s palm. When the greeting is over, it is all he can do to force himself to let go.

Theseus takes them into the backyard like they had planned it in advance. Maybe he has, Credence thinks, recognising a fresh bottle of wine on the deck table and the ash tray he had seen that time through the living room window. Candles have been lit to ward off mosquitos, but Theseus covers them all in bug spray anyway as they pile up around the table, a dense smog hovering overhead until it is dispersed on the back of Percival’s waved hand as he drags a heater next to the table and twists the dial.

“Try not to fumigate us all, would you?” Percival says this, coughing and taking the spray bottle.

“I’d thought it would be a good way to break the ice,” Theseus responds, “when one of us’s got to give the other mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. You’re oldest, Perce, so it’s likely to be you that goes down, monkey in the middle. That’s why you’ve got the chair on the grass, if you could just try to collapse to the left, away from the tile.”

A third chair has been procured from somewhere, straddling the grass and the deck tile. It does not match and is occupied by Percival, pointedly, his hand on Theseus’s on the back of the chair, which Credence watches through the reflection of the three of them wobbling in the living room window.

“Thoughtful,” Percival says as he sits, “I’m sure it puts Credence at ease that you’re already talking about kissing.”

“Credence looks like he was born at ease,” says Theseus lightly, with a little wink at Credence, who feels anything but. “But, between us, I’ve been sat here with my nerves all evening, waiting for you two. This is really weird, isn’t it?”

“The goal was to make it not weird,” Percival says. He pours them each a glass of wine, brushing his fingers over Credence’s wrist when he takes his, guiding him into the chair at his side. “The goal was to make it feel perfectly normal.”

“Perce, mate, hate to be the bearer of bad news.” Theseus laughs and takes out a cigarette as he says this, then turns and offers the pack to Credence. Leans over to light Credence’s first before his own.

The table is small. Their elbows touch until Theseus pushes his chair back over the tile. Credence mimics him, staring at the lit cigarette between his own fingers, belt-lick scab over his knuckles, the bruise on his wrist that could be shadow from his overhanging sleeve. He switches hands, tucking the beaten one into his pocket. Decides that he is going to fuck Theseus, somehow. One day. If not today, then this week. This is not how he had expected to feel, and the surprise of it makes him giddy and sick.

“It was always going to be weird,” Theseus says, as though he has read this thought off the air. “I think the best we can do is have a drink and hope we forget how we all know each other.” He’s joking. They all know that he’s joking, but he winks again at Credence anyway and tops up Percival’s glass, already half-empty, as he says, “Do you think we’re meant to play one of those table games, or something? ‘Guess Who’?”

It is weird, and in the end they settle for the table game that Theseus had mentioned, which Percival explains to Credence in whisper. The rules are not complicated. Apart from the fact that he has only glimpsed movies in passing, on the screens of other peoples’ laptops in the cast break room, and has no other cultural knowledge, no knowledge of television beyond Televangelists and no concept of pop music, Credence does not embarrass himself. Someone - Theseus, he thinks, when he sees the untidy handwriting after - had thoughtfully given him Joan of Arc. He likes the game, though it involves an awful lot of looking into each other’s faces. They end up laughing more than looking, and this is almost okay.

Am I dead or living? he asks them.

Dead, Percival says, but Theseus says, Eternal life,you’re an angel, probably. A folk hero. Some people still talk about you and love you. I’ve got a cousin who worshipped you when she was sixteen.

Am I a girl or a boy?

That’s always the question, Theseus laughs, plucking the collar of Credence’s mormon shirt. You are a girl dressed in boy’s clothes, maybe. The jury’s out, we have no way of knowing.

Am I religious?

You speak with God, Percival says.

Theseus: Or, God speaks to you.

He knows who he is now, but he asks anyway, for the sake of extending the game, Was I put on trial? Was I burnt alive? Am I a Catholic saint?

They celebrate, Theseus pounding the table while Credence laughs, Percival refilling glasses and then tossing the empty bottle across the yard, where it falls like the shadow of a shot bird into the grass. Theseus, after it has rolled and flattened a knot of larkspur, says, “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Percival says. Leans heavily into his chair. “I think I’m drunk. Shit.”

“Well, that was the idea, wasn’t it?”

“I forgot,” Percival says, “I have to drive Credence home later.” He grasps thickly for Credence’s left hand and rolls it over in his palm. “Dammit,” he says. “I’m sorry, Credence. I didn’t think.”

“I’ll drive you, Credence,” Theseus says. “I haven’t had nearly as much. Give me an hour, and it’ll be like I haven’t had anything at all.”

In the car together, alone, Credence thinks, watching them. The thought is too much. The wine has turned his brain into a clawing, awful thing, his high from winning the game falling as quickly as the bottle from midair. Weirdo. He takes his hand from Percival’s and toys with the corner of the paper folded into fourths in his pocket, then excuses himself to the bathroom while Percival and Theseus discuss the gas meter on the car, which Percival thinks will not make it to the motel without a stop at the gas station on the way out.

Wine, coming back up, looks like blood. Turns the white toilet bowl purple-red. Despite what Ma does to them all, Credence has never seen a lot of blood at once, and the idea of so much of it unsettles him. He flushes it alongside the pulpy remains of Floridian divorce statutes and stands there after, staring at himself in the mirror, feeling strangely empty.

By the time that he makes his way downstairs again, the chill has pushed their little party into the kitchen, a fresh bottle of wine uncorked beside the singular stalk of larkspur in the glass vase. It’s Percival who cuts the flower stalk, or his landscaper, and sets it into the vase. Must be a fresh one every day, Credence thinks, because he has never seen it wilted. He crosses to the table and takes the flower from the glass and holds it up for inspection. 

“There you are, sweetheart.” - Percival, drunk, perking up like a leaf on a vine.

Credence inspects him too, his ruddy cheeks and bright eyes, his hands splayed over the dark table which has been polished to such an immense and unnatural shine that Credence can also see the reflection of his own face watching Percival’s hand in its gleaming surface. He has never seen Percival drunk before, he thinks. He drops the flower back into the vase and sits.

A glass slides over the table, attached to a pale, long-fingered hand. He blinks into it for a moment before realising that it is not wine. “Water,” says Theseus. “I should’ve asked if you’d eaten, coming straight here from work.”

“Thank you.”

Credence drinks slowly. The water tastes like grass, the way that Florida tap water always seems to, as though it has trickled into the tap from a puddle in the yard. He makes himself drink all of it, setting the glass back down onto the table only once it’s empty and Theseus, who had been watching, turns back to the kitchen counter to drive a knife through a green apple on the chopping board.

“Would you like some of this, too?” Theseus asks over his shoulder.

“Yes, please.”

The apple on the table sliced into even rings, five seed-shaped cavities forming a perfect star at the centre, the last imprint of apple blossom hidden in the pale flesh of the fruit. He takes one and bites it crisply in half. Percival’s hand tap-tapping at his wrist. There are always five seeds in an apple, Credence remembers. Something he had written once in his shaky schoolboy cursive back when Ma was still pretending to want him home-educated. Five seeds in an apple, they will always form a star. The Lord maketh them so.

It’s too quiet. Percival suggests that they play cards, but Credence doesn’t know the rules, and Percival is too drunk, the deck slid back into a drawer.

Percival takes Credence’s hand in his own and holds it. Now Theseus is sat down as well, looking at Percival, the both of them looking at him. He takes a bite of apple and looks back.

Still holding Credence’s hand, Percival’s large and calloused and almost hot. Makes Credence’s palm sweat as he watches Theseus get up to throw grapes into a bowl. That is when he notices how fresh all of the food is in this kitchen, the bowl of fruit on the counter and the pile of avocados beside it. The bright, modern green of the cabinets, so different from the dark bedroom upstairs.

Credence feels his wrist turned over. In the mirror-reflection of the tabletop, he watches Percival’s eyes scan the striped bruises there, the ceiling lamp a smear of white on the table beside it. All that the human eye can see, he remembers, is photons. Photons from light reflected off of objects which are forever invisible, or visible only to God. Reflections of reflections, each one further from the truth. He pulls his hand away, and Percival lets him.

“It’s late,” Percival says.

When the replacement manager had taken over for Percival, in the week when they did not see each other, there was a note on Percival’s desk about needing to see Credence. It was particularly hot under the costume head that day. Credence had stomped up half in his character suit still, his hands and his face the only parts that were his own. He’d stood in the office doorway while the not-Percival looked over this note, searching for clues about why it might exist, and then he had shrugged and sent Credence back downstairs with a stern warning about the lazy way that he’d been signing his g’s. That was the day after Ma had beat him, and his entire body felt like dropped fruit then, tender and sore. He had gone into the bathroom after and thrown up, and there was a single pink Valentine’s Day rose on the sink where he washed his hands, that someone had left behind. Its head hung heavy over the ledge of the sink, like the body of a murder victim, loose petal and wilted leaf. He left without touching it and went back to his shift. It was already dying.

To fill the silence, he says, “Do you cut the flowers every day for the glass? What do you do with the old ones?”

But Percival does not understand. “Those are my mother’s favourite flowers,” he says. “When we bought the house, she came down and planted them.”

No one loves this house, Credence sees it then. That is why Theseus had gone to Hong Kong for a year ahead of Percival and why Percival would not bring Credence inside. He taps the tabletop beside his glass of water, which has been refilled by Theseus, ever in motion, setting grapes and cheese and crackers out onto the table. Everything so fresh, like the Tide-bright produce section they never venture into at Publix, except to buy apples when they are on sale, or the occasional pear. Another fruit with a star, he thinks.

“You should just stay here tonight,” Percival says. He snaps a grape from the withered vine and bursts it between his front teeth, watching Credence. Credence watching his watching in the tabletop, the lines of him wavy. Photons are both waves, like sound, and particulate. Red makes a lower frequency and is many, and then his brain stalls over the rest of the facts. He had not been able to understand the difference between the frequencies of red and blue light, or anything about electrons. “Not in a weird way,” Percival says, and then he repeats, “It’s late.” Eats another grape.

“I’m going into the yard to smoke,” says Theseus. He holds the door open for Credence to follow him. Outside again and without the heater, the yard is dark and cold. “You haven’t got a jacket,” Theseus comments over the click of his lighter, handing a lit cigarette to Credence, slipping another out of the pack for himself.

“Winter is short here,” Credence says.

“So, you freeze through it?” He laughs. “It drives Perce mad, you know. He wants to buy you one. He’s a control freak like that.” Over his shoulder, the kitchen is a scratch of light in the dark. Percival is still sitting at the table, staring into his fancy cellphone, his forehead tipped forward into his hand like a wilted rose on a stalk. “It comes from a place of love,” Theseus adds gently.

The human eye can recognise a single photon as a flash of light in a single point. The photon will be absorbed by a rod in the eye but go no further, because there is no equipment small enough to transport the information from a single photon in a single rod in the eye up to the brain for processing. Not important enough to speak with the manager, the photon is seen but never registered, does not exist in the official record.

In the same way, Credence and Theseus would not even be visible from space. Two small specks lost to the sheer abundance of the Earth around them. Even zooming in, you would have to zoom in an awful lot, and then they would be like two floaters over the blue-black darkness through the windshield of the car, toy-small, like the world through an airplane window just before landing. None of their individual appendages would be visible, their cigarettes maybe as dots of light in the windows, but not Theseus’s eyes or Credence’s naked wrist where it is jointed to his hand, holding his cigarette.

“Someone did that to you,” Theseus nods at the striped bruises as he switches lanes. “I don’t mean to pry,” he says, “except, I sort of do, don’t I? Is it your mum?”

“Yeah,” Credence says, because there is nothing else to say without lying.

“I’m sorry,” Theseus says. “I thought you’d tell me to fuck off.” The lamplight coming in through the car window makes his face blue and then gold. He holds his cigarette between his pointer and middle finger over the wheel, and that’s when Credence sees the ring, a thin silver band much subtler than Percival’s watch. “You remind me a bit of my younger brother,” Theseus says. “He’d have told me to fuck off.” Smiling to himself at this, he sticks the cigarette between his lips to that he can make the left into the motel parking lot. “He’s very private, Newt. I’m not. I’m an open book, really. I couldn’t imagine what I would think of you, when I’d met you finally. I kept thinking I was going to hate you, but here you are, and it’s not like that, is it?”

“No,” Credence agrees. “No, it isn’t. I thought - ” He shrugs, unbuckling his seatbelt, and falls silent.

The truth is that he had intended to loathe Theseus, wished that he was Theseus, and now finds that he does not want to leave him. That he would like nothing better than to stay in this car and drive back to the unloved house and sleep penned in by two men’s bodies, by these two quite specifically, and never step foot in the motel again. And at the same time that he wants this, his hand is on the door handle, opening the door. Letting it hang on its hinge. He feels what he thinks is the snake in his throat, but on swallowing, it is just the silly mass of his own tongue. He bites it.

“You could always drive back with me tonight and stay,” Theseus says, with a nod at his wrist. “It would make Perce happy.”

Credence’s mouth opens and shuts again. Without pausing to think, he leans in the other direction, towards Theseus, and kisses him softly on the cheek.

His face is wet as he crosses the parking lot, no matter how often he swipes at it with the back of his hand. Why did he get out of the car? Until that point, when he got out and closed the door behind him and Theseus, after a pause, had driven off, it felt, impossibly, as though the entire world really were open to him. Now it has closed in on itself again, narrow as a ring of lamplight, constrained, as it is, to space. Light will be absorbed and destroyed by the most absorbent thing which happens to be nearest. For example, the black asphalt beneath his new shoes, the matte green paint on the door, and Ma’s eyes following him from her bed as he is let in. Watching him take off his belt and lay it at the foot of her bed, where she is reading. Over her shoulder, the clock reads just after ten. He goes ahead of her into the bathroom to wait.

She does not come immediately. He is still drunk, he realises, staring into the blackness of his own eyes in the mirror. The bathroom flickers. This is not a symptom of his drunkenness, but of the bulb going out overhead. Buzzing overhead. They will have to call the motel manager in to fix it. That is, Chastity will have to call, or Ma. When Credence calls, the manager never comes, and then he smiles after, in the lobby. He seems to derive an unnatural amount of joy from this, as though he is playing a game of which only he is aware, and, as such, is winning.

A singular flash catches Credence’s eye above the toilet. She left the clippers out, wrapped in their cord. This is how she catches him, when the bookmark has been settled between the pages of her book, and Modesty tucked into the crook of Chastity’s arm with a pillow pressed against her other ear; Credence, the clippers droning against the side of his head, the dying bulb cutting light from the room in gasps.

“You smell like alcohol,” Ma tells him. She takes the clippers and his hair into her hands. “You have been drinking.”

“I’m in love,” Credence says. Around him, his hair falls in clumps like dry earth onto the tile floor. He feels no better for having said it. His face is still wet in the mirror, and for the first time since leaving the car, he makes the connection that he is crying. “I don’t want you to hit me anymore.” He catches her hand by the wrist, the buzzer droning against the back of his skull, behind his ear.

“Hold still,” she says, shaking herself from his grip. He watches in the mirror as she purses her lips, lays her hand over the base of his neck, and presses his head back down.

Haptotropism:

A curve in response to touch -

thigmotropism, plants will curve, generally, around the thing that is touching them. If it sticks around long enough, and if it is solid.

In the church at home, they had a single potted vine in the kitchen window. It was older than they were, had come with the building back in the eighties and embedded itself around loose lead in the glass until it was virtually inextricable, and Ma had to concede defeat. Every week or so, one of them would tip a cup of dishwater into the soil while doing dishes. It lived on this grey water and threads of sunlight that managed to squeeze down the sides of the tall building next door. Modesty called it Abraham, in secret, Credence knows. Because he had lived to be several centuries old, and to a child, everything that is older than they are is as likely to predate them by a hundred years as by a single one.

When they moved, Ma cut the stuck vines from the plant and had Credence carry the pot to the curb. The little bits of it lodged into the window-lead shrivelled and turned brown, without the mother plant to feed them. He picked those dead pieces out on the last day with his fingernail, before the taxi came to drive them all off to the airport for their flight to Florida.

Alternatively, haptotropism -

The way that Chastity comes to leave Ma is this:

She is waiting for the sound of the belt when she hears you instead, asking your mother not to hit you. You want to beg and had intended to beg, but only this one sentence comes out of your mouth as you stare at the hard lines around her eyes in the bathroom mirror.

A single sentence, you think, is all that it took for Christ, but you are not Christ and never have been. The only thing that has ever been messianic about you is the way that your hands will curve around any shirttail, around any human body like tendrils on a vine like they will save you. These people have passed through your fingers like water like Christ, who came and went and rose and left the world exactly the same as it was before.

You will not go back to the unloved house where the two men two shirttails you were clinging to will leave anyway. You realised, as you watched your head plucked bald beneath her loveless hand, that you will never see them again, because she has you.

When she finishes shaving your head, she tells you to clean up the mess and go to bed, leaves you blinking beneath the suffocating light bulb, with clumps of your own hair on your shoulders and hair on your wet face. You watch in the mirror as she smacks hair off your shoulder with the meat of her palm. Without hair, your face stares back like an alien thing, eyes twice as large as before. You see now that your skull is not perfectly round. Her palm swipes roughly over it, brushing loose hair from your head onto the floor. Once you are mostly clean, she sets the clippers back over the toilet and lands a bracing slap across your cheek that makes your nose sting somewhere deep inside.

She says, Do not ever do this again.

You will not leave her, but it turns out that Chastity has been consulting with a lawyer back home in the city since August. You had no idea. She hates Florida and what the heat has wrung out of your mother. Chastity was always cleverer than you, has bags packed beneath the bed. She says, You should go too, while you have the chance.

She knows that you won’t. Only one of you has ever had to sleep in the bathtub. It would never have been her.

Pathotropism. The attraction of healthy cells to diseased cells, typically to cancer cells, like a magnetic pull towards decay. Your cheek is bruised when you wake up the next morning, though you cannot remember her having hit you that hard. You stop to touch it in the curved reflection of a tinted car window in the parking lot. Then you take a walk to see the cows. It’s a long walk, and the day is hot. By the time you get back, sweaty and exhausted, both of your sisters are already at the airport and your mother is staring into the wall from the card table where you all eat your supper together on Fridays and Sundays.

Credence, she says. She takes your hand but does not hold it. You are holding the table beneath the feather weight of her hand on yours. I knew you hadn’t gone, she says.

You move away and begin to make supper for just the two of you, these acts of service being the only kind of love she has ever taught you to express with any competence. Neither of you says anything else for the rest of the evening.

You spend three days with her like this, sweeping the floors in the new church and continuing to sleep on the floor in the motel where she has to step over you to get into the bathroom in the morning, even though there is now no one in the second bed. You try to visit Tina but find that you cannot look her in the eye, so you go back.  
You go back.

When Ma drops you off, finally, at work on Thursday after three days of avoiding it, staring at her thumbs on the wheel in the cast member parking lot, you know, like a premonition, that you will never see her again. You realise then how stupid you are. How blindly you have walked into everything your entire life. How short this has caught you, like a snag in your chest. You realise then that you are not ready, press your finger into the spongey button beside the tape slot in the car stereo, take the tape, and stick it into your pocket.

This is the only thing that you take with you from home. For a long time, it will be the only thing that you own that ties you to the first twenty-four years of your life, in New York and in Florida. For a long time, it will sit in a box, in a drawer, in the bottom of a cabinet in a warm little house in a fashionable neighbourhood in Hong Kong, and you will not listen to it for even longer than that. Not until you pull it out one day to show the woman you have begun tentatively to call Mum, Theseus’s mum, this part of you so that she can understand what no one else does, and she takes your hand in hers and holds it and takes your cheek in her other hand and holds your face against her heart over a woollen sweater and tells you that it is beautiful music. Calls you darling and tells you that you have a beautiful voice. You beautiful darling, dear thing. None of them has ever heard you sing. She is being nice to you, flattering you because she loves you, and you know it, because your voice has always been pitchy and sad, but you love her, so you get up off of the couch and offer to take her out for lunch.

She hosted your wedding the summer prior in a rain-green field on the property where she breeds racing horses.

An old boarding school friend of Theseus’ had registered online to become a wedding officiant, and then you met him one night in a bar on a visit to London, on a good night when you were all at your best, and he said, You’re all so sickeningly charming and good-looking together. I could marry you three. Not legally, of course - and you all laughed, but the idea stuck. Not legally, but official. A forever pledge, Percival calls it.

This time, you all got rings. They are simple gold. They do not replace the silver band or the watch from before. Like you yourself, they are an addition to a love that was already. Thank God for that love, you think. That love saved you.

This was how you found yourself with the others on the field, listening to horse whinnying, larkspur so deep and violently purple in your hair that it made your black hair look purple, too.

There was a small mention of God in the official liturgy, at your request. You had prayed over it with the young priest in the village church, who looked like an Irish boy you’d taken a photography class with in Hong Kong. Same ruddy cheeks and red hair, quoting to you Colossians 3:14 on a bench in the parish garden, Clothe yourself in love. Hebrews 13:2, Forget not to show love. Peter 5:7, God careth for you. You had not remembered that particular verse in Peter. He pointed it out to you on the page.

Here, Credence. Right here. I can’t make this stuff up, you know. God careth for you. Specifically you, and he touched your arm.

You quoted it in your vows. When you cried, they reached out in unison for your hands.

Allergies, you said. 

Percival said, Happy allergies, I hope, and you all laughed, and you spent the evening drunk beneath the gauzy party tent telling jokes about polygamist compounds and teasing Percival for his fear of horses.

There are photographs of you like that, young and handsome and laughing, flower petals in your hair, in Theseus’s mother’s veil, holding your kisses at the corner of your mouth like a dowery. An image of yourself that was like nothing you had ever seen before, that had stunned you when she showed it to you the following week, in a book of other photos.

Everyone needs pictures of themselves when they are their happiest and prettiest, she said.

And now. And anyway. And anyway, you haven’t sung anything since that afternoon in the car with Ma on the way to the new church. Weeks before you left her. She had the same seawater blue eyes that you find on Theseus’ face at the dinner table, or, jarringly, when he is touching you sometimes, or leaning over to kiss the naked skin of your back in the early morning before he goes to work. That is the only detail you remember of her face from then, taken over by him now.

When you show the tape to Theseus, he tells you that he knows some of those songs from church in England and promises to take you there. Blinks with his Ma-blue eyes, the colour of Lake Erie, which you have seen in photographs unfurled to you by the eternal scrolling images page of an internet search engine, and which you sometimes also use to locate the website of her church. You realise then how good Theseus is with you, how clever he is at navigating around your sharpest bits, remember what you now know of how much he had already gone through with Percival while you were still reading psalms in a rundown church on Pike Street and thought of Florida merely as someplace warm.

Then you show the tape to Percival in the bedroom beside the drooping vine that needs water and the bouquet of dried larkspur that you had worn in your hair on your wedding day. And he kisses you. In the Hong Kong house, in the bedroom kisses over the shiny skin on your palm, where you had held it over the burner once in those early days of togetherness when anger was still a wild animal that did with your body what it pleased. The spiral of time curls ever upward, like a tendril on a green vine. It has been years since anyone has raised their hand to you outside of bed, when you ask for it.

You tell him about the snake that morning while you’re both still lying in bed unclothed, and he says, Is that supposed to be a metaphor for something?

Yeah. For me. You bite his lip. I’m the snake, you say. It’s a metaphor for me.

Ah, so this is why you never chew when you eat, he says, and licks the side of your jaw before getting up for work.

Going back in the narrative. He’ll try to remember, years down the road in the spotless modern office of a highly-regarded English-speaking therapist in Hong Kong, whether he said anything to Ma as he got out of the car. Does it matter? He will go back and forth on it, in that now-distant future. Maybe he says good bye. Maybe she tells him to move the seatbelt from the door, so that it won’t get caught when he shuts it behind him.He doesn’t wait for the car to peel out of the parking lot, because the bus is already there. He has to run for it as-is.

Late to his shift, he has to explain himself to the faceless voice of disapproval at the entertainment desk as he signs in. Can’t skip his warm-up, because it’s company policy.

Babs, patting his hand over the register in costuming, says, We all have our days, hon. You look like you’ve had your share of yours.

The day stacks itself up around him. Methodical oscillation between sets on the restaurant floor and breaks in the tunnel, away from everyone. Waiting for a call from Percival that seems increasingly unlikely to come as the hours grow taller. For a little while, Credence feels so close to tears that he walks with his head bowed, but they do not come either. He skips lunch, his stomach feels like a curled fist stuck to the base of his spine. He tries to imagine what he will do when the shift is over, if nothing else happens. Will he go back to the parking lot after all to wait for her?

He remembers that Chastity, in leaving, had said, You will be an old man still letting her beat you up, Credence. Try to picture that.

“Credence,” Percival comes for him in person, no clipboard in sight but scrubbing at his forehead like the very looking at Credence exhausts him. “Can I have a minute?”

They go up into the office without touching or looking each other in the eye. The computer is on, the screen of a word document so bright and white that it hums. Credence sees his own name over a line as Percival twists it from view. “You didn’t call,” Percival says, and he wants to laugh in the twenty or so second he sits there mistaking this sentence for personal hurt, before Percival shoves a paper at him across the desk, again with his name on it and the word ‘Reprimand’ typed out in capital letters across the top.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Percival says. Time moves upward as on a spiral. Sometimes so slowly, that the seconds almost seem to fall back down the other way like jewellery beads on wire. A lot of seconds fall like that, in the wrong direction, before Percival says, “If I write down that you were sick, I won’t have to give you this.”

“I am sick.”

He holds Credence’s gaze without blinking as he types. “I know that, Credence,” he says. “I already know. Theseus told me.”

All of human reality is shaped by touch, whether we are actually touching anything or hovering a distance so slight it is only perceptible to God as the electrons in our body repel the electrons of everything else. The almost-collision of everything is as close to touch as we ever get. Light as photon on rod in eye, passed through to brain. Sound beating the delicate hairs and drum in the ear. What we taste, what we put in our mouths. Our largest organ is skin. Even hair touches, coming out of the follicle. Only waves expand outward, separating over time, and are immortal for it.

Somewhere, maybe, in a distant galaxy lightyears from here into the future, an alien creature is listening to Credence or Chastity’s childhood rhymes, as distorted by travel through space and time as the magnetic strip on the tape he still has in his pocket. To alien ears, he imagines they will simply sound cruel. Aliens might not know anything about human children, especially not the kind of children they were, hollow-mouthed little crows in the church rafters. Those rhymes, disconnected from the context of everything else, will not tell the alien about what often happened after, once they had both been whipped and sent off without supper, how he would knock at her door then with a pencil and a piece of paper and pretend to take her order for a large dinner, as though they were in a restaurant.

But even that memory, Credence knows, is false trickery, a product of his human mind ever-desperate to plug gaps in the puzzle, like the sensation of touch. Usually Chastity told him to go away through the keyhole, and he did, bitterly. If they had ever been as close as they needed each other to be, they would have become very different people from the kind they are now.

When he left Percival’s office to go back to his shift, he had gone down the stairs instead and out through the kitchen, into the restaurant, still dressed in his character basics. No one noticed him. If they did, he was unimportant. He slipped out into the ecstatic obscurity of the theme park without telling anyone where he was going, or that he was going. He hadn’t been sure, until he was out. And then he was there, following the inlaid trolley tracks up Main Street, past a knot of balloons and a photographer and kiosks for food. His feet took him as far as the castle. He stood in front of it, let it build itself up in his eyes until it seemed much larger than it was, and then he found a bench and sat down, and waited until it grew dark.

In its essence, the park is just the restaurant at a larger scale, unconstrained by walls or roof and without a buffet. He watches the same families go by, the same mothers with their cameras and children crying for ice cream. Maybe it was unfair, after all the badness he invested himself in for his own sake, never to have snuck Modesty here. Just once. She would have lost her mind just to have stood where Credence is sitting now, in the shadow of this concrete castle where no princess has ever lived. Behind it, the sun drops like a yolk into the horizon, spitting gold across the sky.

When he looks up again, Percival is standing at the base of the castle. He’s punching a drinking straw through the lid of a cup, frowning. His name-tag is still pinned to his shirt. He walks over slowly, holding out the cup, sliding onto the bench beside Credence while Credence swipes at the wetness on his face.

“I was told that the ‘Other Tigger just, like, left,’” Percival says. He jerks his chin up at the castle, gathering night around itself like a blanket. “Figured you might get thirsty,” he says, pushing the cup across the bench. 

From the name tag on his shirt, Credence reads ‘Percy - Celebration, Florida’. He picks up the drink.

“Ginger Ale,” Percival clarifies, watching him. “I thought - ” He raises his hand, a flickered, bird-like movement in Credence’s periphery. “I don’t know what I thought, to be honest with you. You just looked rough,” he says, touching his own thick hair. “I mean - fuck, Credence. Just, fuck. Goddammit. I wish you’d talk to me. I wish I knew what the hell was going on in your life.” Each word punched out over the tip of his tongue like its own separate statement. 

As Percival speaks, Credence watches his breathe make a fog of the words. A loudspeaker announces the countdown until the fireworks show. Their spot has trickled steadily full of fireworks enthusiasts, chatter din. In New York, Modesty and Chastity will be driving into the city in a taxi, maybe. On their way to the temporary apartment that Chastity had set up through a Christian organisation. Planned to a fault, with Modesty’s birth certificate tucked into a plastic sheathe in her purse. She had not said goodbye to Ma. 

“I wouldn’t have been weird about it,” Percival says. Against the dark, the pale fog around his chin looks like a departing soul. 

“Is it too late?” 

“For us?” Percival asks. “Of course not. We’re both sitting here, aren’t we?”

“Huh.”

It had been easier thinking, snake. When Credence moves now, he is just solid body. A human one, he thinks. Reading everything in touch, touch, touch, touch, touch, touch. Baby monkeys, he had read in the back of a magazine once from the New York Public Library, who had been separated from their mothers at birth, displayed symptoms of emotional disturbance, couldn’t function in groups, starved. They clung to their diapers because those were the only warm things they had to hold on to, until the scientists made them a set of doll mothers from pillows and soft cloth. No wonder God for Moses had been a burning bush, he thinks, all these forced orphans. And then. His hand closes over Percival’s, holding it against the bench. Maybe life does not adapt as well, he thinks, to metaphors as much as twenty years of Bible study would have him believe.

“You want to get the hell out of here?” Percival asks.

He hadn’t realised how cold he was until Percival’s arm is slung around him. He presses the tip of his nose into Percival’s warm neck and holds his breath. Sends the air flying out in front of him like white inkspill into the night. 

“Let’s go,” he says, glancing a final time up at the castle, lit up by purple floodlight. “Get me out of here,” he says. “Take me home.”


End file.
